Sometimes, ratings stories are about a trend running through an entire season relative to previous years. At other times, though, they’re about specific matchups and the ways those matchups play out. And the latter seems to be the case for the NBA’s conference finals this year.
After a regular season that saw the league finish down 2% year-over-year nationally (certainly an achievement considering the much darker tone of a lot of the earlier media discourse), but with a more concerning 13% local drop, the playoffs were going very well indeed. Indeed, through the second round, the NBA was up 2% year-over-year. But the conference finals have presented one very good ratings story and one significantly worse one.
On the positive front, the New York Knicks-Indiana Pacers Eastern Conference Finals series has been excellent for the league through five games. Through four games, it was hitting notable highs, including the best Game 3 ECF number (7.1 million viewers across TNT and truTV) since the Atlanta Hawks-Cleveland Cavaliers clash in 2015 and the best Game 4 number (6.7 million) since the Boston Celtics-Cleveland Cavaliers battle in 2018. That continued in Thursday’s Game 5, which averaged 6.72 million viewers, the most for that game since 2018. And overall, the series through five games is averaging 6.74 million viewers, up 7% over 2024 (where the Pacers lost to the Boston Celtics) and the highest average since 2018.
The other conference final has been a dramatically different story, though. The first game of the Minnesota Timberwolves-Oklahoma City Thunder Western Conference Finals clash drew the worst numbers for a WCF G1 since a (date-shifted) 2021 Los Angeles Clippers-Phoenix Suns clash, which had the benefit of airing on ABC. Timberwolves-Thunder G1 averaged just 5.36 million viewers across ESPN and an InsightCast alternate broadcast on ESPN2, down 24% from last year’s Timberwolves-Dallas Mavericks opener. And that trend largely continued throughout the series and was reinforced in Wednesday’s clinching Game 5, as Jon Lewis wrote at Sports Media Watch Friday:
Wednesday’s Timberwolves-Thunder NBA Western Conference Finals Game 5 averaged 4.62 million viewers on ESPN, topping only Nuggets-Lakers Game 2 on an NFL Sunday in September 2020 (3.28M) as the least-watched WCF game since 2013 (Grizzlies-Spurs Game 2: 4.62M).
…Oklahoma City’s blowout win was also the least-watched WCF Game 5 since Jazz-Spurs in 2007 (3.94M), falling even below that Lakers-Nuggets series in the 2020 “bubble” (4.99M). (The 2013 Spurs-Grizzlies series ended in a sweep.) Viewership declined 26% from last year’s Mavericks-Timberwolves Game 5 on TNT and truTV (6.26M).
…The full, five-game Thunder-Timberwolves series averaged 5.59 million — down 17% from Mavericks-Timberwolves last year (6.74M) and the least-watched conference final since 2021 (Suns-Clippers: 5.49M; Bucks-Hawks: 4.99M).
To be sure, some of that’s about the WCF games not being particularly competitive. The Thunder won 124-94 Wednesday, and four of the five games were highly lopsided. The one that wasn’t (Oklahoma City’s 128-126 Game 4 win, where the max lead was 11) drew 6.53 million viewers, not far behind the average for Knicks-Pacers. But, without the appeal of a close game, these teams were not pulling in the viewers en masse. And that’s despite previous league scheduling strategies during the regular-season focused on giving the Thunder some key windows and introducing them to more viewers.
The WCF-ECF discrepancy is further reinforced by the WCF being on ESPN and the ECF being on TNT. This wound up as a very good postseason to date for TNT, and one that could even get better if Knicks-Pacers goes to 7 games. For ESPN, it’s still been good ahead of the Finals on ABC (their overall playoff ratings are up 7% year-over-year despite the WCF numbers), but there will certainly be questions about how well those Finals will do if it’s not the Knicks advancing (which is already sparking conspiracy theories). It may not help to have a face of ESPN already giving the Knicks “zero chance” of beating the Thunder if they do advance, too.
Who will be in the Finals, and how that ratings story will play out, remains to be seen, as we don’t even know which two cities will be in this tale. Perhaps the ECF ratings have a lot to do with the Pacers and thrilling games as well as just the Knicks, and maybe a Pacers-Thunder series can draw. Perhaps the Thunder are a better draw than the WCF showed and the blowouts were the real culprit. Perhaps the Knicks will take the series in 7 and having the country’s No. 1 media market on board will lead to a record Finals. All that us monkeys with typewriters know at the moment is that these two conference finals have produced dramatically different ratings stories, so it will be interesting to see what happens when their winners face off.