NHL

Last Friday’s opening round of the NHL Draft averaged 616,000 viewers on ESPN, up 15% from last year, and behind only the Connor Bedard draft of 2023 (681K) as the most-watched on record.

The season premiere of the BIG3 basketball league — including a Miami-Los Angeles game that was shortened after an altercation — averaged 560,000 viewers on CBS last weekend, on par with last year’s season average.

Last Thursday’s Dream-Fever WNBA regular season game averaged 816,000 viewers on Amazon Prime Video, the largest WNBA audience yet for the streamer, which is in its first season of carrying Nielsen-rated games. Read more

The week prior to the U.S. Open, the final round of the PGA Tour Canadian Open averaged 2.34 million viewers on CBS — down slightly from last year’s 2.38 million. Third round action drew 1.68 million the previous day.

San Antonio led all markets for the NBA Finals, averaging a 25.9 rating for the Spurs’ five-game defeat at the hands of the Knicks. That figure almost certainly trails each of the Spurs’ previous NBA Finals — the market routinely delivered local ratings in the 30s and 40s during those years — albeit in a different era of television (and Nielsen methodology). Read more

Airing in the window that used to belong to “Sunday Night Baseball,” last weekend’s West Virginia-North Carolina Men’s College World Series game averaged 2.0 million viewers on ESPN — the third-largest audience on record for a non-final Men’s College World Series game. Read more

Wednesday’s Tempo-Fever WNBA regular season game averaged 1.00 million viewers on USA Network, marking the largest audience for a WNBA game on cable or streaming this season.