NBA Finals
The NBA viewership story was bailed out by the two most beautiful words in sports: Game 7.
Oklahoma City’s 103-91 win over Indiana on Sunday night averaged 16,353,000 viewers on ABC and ESPN+ and peaked with 19,281,000 viewers from 9:45-10 p.m. ET. That made Sunday night’s game the most-watched NBA Finals game since Game 6 of the 2019 NBA Finals between the Raptors and Warriors, which drew 18.3 million viewers.
The seven-game series finished with an average of 10.266 million viewers, down from the 11.3 million average for the five-game series last year between the Boston Celtics and Dallas Mavericks.
Was market size a factor? Indianapolis is the 25th-largest media market in the country and Oklahoma City is No. 47. The series was trending much further down before Game 7’s big number. Clearly, a significant number of people decided to watch this series only for its final game. Sports Business Journal’s Austin Karp offered an interesting comparison for context: The NBA’s Game 7 viewership was roughly in line with the 16.6 million viewers who watched Texas-Georgia in the SEC Football Championship in December.
