The close of the NBA and NHL seasons usually signals a relatively quiet time in the U.S. sports landscape. Baseball, the WNBA, NASCAR and the domestic soccer leagues roll on, but the noise dies down through the summer.
Not this year. With the NBA Finals and NHL’s Stanley Cup Final both hitting multi-year ratings highs, and the men’s World Cup off to a huge start (in both English and Spanish), the summer lull for sports on TV will be postponed for at least a month.
In fact, not including Olympic years, June and July are setting up to be the biggest sports summer in more than a decade.
The Stanley Cup Final, won by the Carolina Hurricanes in six games, had its largest TV audience since 2019. The NBA Finals, which saw the New York Knicks take their first title since 1973, drew the most viewers since the end of the Michael Jordan era in Chicago. And the World Cup? It appears to be off to its best start ever in the United States.
It’s a rough measure at best, but the three audience totals above add up to just under 40 million viewers. In years with a men’s or Women’s World Cup since 2014, no NBA-NHL-World Cup combination has come anywhere close to that; the highest prior total was 27.75 million in 2014 (15.54 million for the NBA Finals, 4.7 million for the Stanley Cup and 7.5 million for the early days of the World Cup).
