Despite three of the four NBA conference finalists coming from small markets, viewership was able to hold relatively strong.
According to Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch, viewership for the NBA playoffs is up 3% year-over-year through the Conference Finals, averaging 4.2 million viewers per game across ABC, ESPN, ESPNU, TNT, and NBA TV. When excluding ESPNU and NBA TV, the average jumps to 4.5 million viewers per game, which is also up 3% compared to last season.
Conference Finals viewership itself was a mixed bag. The six-game Eastern Conference Finals between the Indiana Pacers and New York Knicks finished with an average audience of 6.96 million viewers on TNT, up 10% from the Boston Celtics’ sweep of the Pacers on ESPN/ABC last season (6.31 million viewers). Pacers-Knicks was the most-watched Eastern Conference Finals since 2014 that did not reach seven games, per Lewis.
The five-game Western Conference Finals between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Minnesota Timberwolves was a different story. Viewership for that series on ESPN and ABC averaged just 5.59 million viewers, down 17% versus Mavericks-Timberwolves on TNT last season (6.26 million viewers). It was the least-watched Conference Final since the pandemic-impacted Suns-Clippers series in 2021 (5.38 million viewers).
Still, given some of the markets involved (Oklahoma City, 47th; Minneapolis-St. Paul, 15th; Indianapolis, 25th), the NBA has to be pleased with a modest increase through this point versus last season. No doubt, a deep run by the Knicks offset some of the small-market flare of the rest of the Conference Finals round.
In its final season airing NBA games, TNT finished the postseason up 1% versus last season, averaging 4.2 million viewers per game. The final episode of Inside the NBA on TNT averaged 3.5 million viewers, the most-watched edition of the show in two years, per TNT Sports.
Also per Lewis, the NBA playoffs have earned its largest “share” in history. Audience share measures what percentage of television sets that are on are tuned into a specific telecast. Over the course of each playoff telecast, 10.6% of TVs in-use were watching the NBA. The metric demonstrates just how much live sports dominates the modern television landscape.
Of course, NBA viewership isn’t so important for the league this season as it enters the first year of its 11-year set of media rights deals with ESPN, NBC, and Amazon this fall. The league is locked into $76 billion in media rights over that period, no matter how many people are watching games.