The most memorable WNBA Finals in history produced a memorable viewership number: ESPN reported Tuesday that 2.15 million viewers watched the New York Liberty hold off the Minnesota Lynx 67-62 in a Game 5 overtime thriller to capture the Liberty’s first WNBA title.
It was the most-viewed WNBA Finals game in 25 years and peaked with 3.3 million viewers. ESPN said the Finals were up 115 percent over last season. Last year’s four-game WNBA Finals between the Las Vegas Aces and Liberty averaged 728,000 viewers.
The viewership breakdown of the series was as follows:
Per Sports Media Watch: Game 5 delivered the largest WNBA audience ever on an NFL Sunday, surpassing the previous high of 1.84 million viewers for Indiana Fever versus Connecticut Sun on ABC in the first round of this year’s playoffs, which marked the playoff debut of Caitlin Clark. Sports Media Watch also noted the only telecasts to draw a larger audience than Game 5 all involved Clark: four Fever games, the WNBA Draft and the WNBA All-Star Game.
The Finals culminated a fantastic year of viewership for the league. Overall, there were 32 WNBA television windows between its media partners that topped one million viewers during the 2024 season, including the WNBA Draft. That crushed the previous record of 15.
Outside of TV viewership, both Minnesota’s Target Center and New York’s Barclays Center set new WNBA attendance records during the Finals, and the Liberty said Game 5 also broke their own single-game sales revenue record.
Want more more records? The 2024 WNBA Finals were also the first-ever league finals to feature multiple overtime games, and in winning this year’s title, the Liberty clinched its first-ever championship and the first major professional basketball championship in New York City in more than four decades.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Minnesota Lynx, New York Liberty, WNBA, Sports Business
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