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Year two of the renewed NBA-NBC partnership is off to a record start.
NBC and Peacock’s two opening-night NBA games Tuesday averaged 6.4 million viewers, according to Nielsen’s Big Data + Panel and Adobe Analytics, NBC announced. It’s the most-watched NBA tip-off night ever, up 14% from last year’s doubleheader, which drew 5.9 million.
The viewership number comes after a strong first year under the NBA’s new $77 billion media rights deal, which brought the league back to NBC for the first time since 2002. In the deal, the NBA kept ESPN as a broadcast partner, added NBC and Amazon’s Prime Video, and dropped TNT.
In 2024, the last year of the previous media deal, the league’s opening-night doubleheader on TNT drew 2.95 million viewers, though those numbers were based on Nielsen’s panel data alone.
Before Tuesday’s games, the previous opening-day viewership record was 5.7 million during the 2010–11 season, a lockout year that started on Christmas Day. It was also the year LeBron James made his Heat debut. This year’s viewership was also buoyed by James’s debut in a new uniform, as the 42-year-old’s first game with the Sixers drew 7.7 million viewers.
NBC said it was the most-watched opening night primetime game ever.
But Philadelphia’s opponents, the defending-champion Knicks, also deserve credit for attracting eyeballs after a 4–1 series win over the Spurs in the NBA’s most-watched Finals this century.
San Antonio played the late-night game Tuesday, hosting the Thunder in a rematch of their epic seven-game Western Conference Finals last season, which actually outdrew the previous season’s Finals viewership. Their game Tuesday drew 4.8 million viewers.
NBC also aired a rare matinee game Tuesday to open the season: a 3 p.m. tip-off between the Celtics and Pistons that drew 2.5 million viewers.
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