The WNBA’s most popular team plays in a winner-take-all playoff game on Tuesday night to determine who makes the WNBA Finals, and the high-stakes matchup will be a late-night affair on ESPN2.
The Las Vegas Aces host the Indiana Fever—the league’s most-watched team—in Game 5 of the WNBA semifinals at 9:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday. The winner will play the Phoenix Mercury in the WNBA Finals, which is expanding to a seven-game series this year.
Even without an injured Caitlin Clark, the Fever have been drawing strong TV ratings this postseason. Game 2 of the semifinals drew 1.7 million viewers on ESPN, marking the third-largest WNBA second-round playoff audience on record. Game 1 averaged 1.4 million viewers on ABC. Viewership for Games 3 and 4 over the weekend is not yet available.
Competing With Baseball
Game 5 of Fever-Aces is being broadcast on ESPN2, which typically draws fewer viewers than ESPN and ABC, because the flagship cable channel is airing MLB wild-card playoff games, and the broadcast network has its standard weeknight programming (ABC usually shows WNBA games only on the weekends).
While there’s no way to know for sure whether a healthy Clark would have led to ESPN shifting its programming to give Fever-Aces a better TV window, it wouldn’t have been surprising to see that come to fruition.
Clark or not, this is the last season that ESPN/Disney is the exclusive broadcaster of the WNBA playoffs. Starting next year, the league’s new $2.2 billion media-rights deals give ESPN two first-round series and NBC and Amazon one series each; the semifinals and Finals will rotate among ESPN, NBC, and Amazon over the 11-year contracts. ESPN will likely have more broadcast inventory next fall, as NBC is primed to take over MLB’s wild-card series.
Clark Closure
Should the Fever beat the Aces, Clark still wouldn’t be available for the WNBA Finals, regardless of her health. That’s because she was left off Indiana’s active roster for the playoffs, and teams are not allowed to add players back on during the postseason.
Clark played just 13 games this season, her last coming July 15 after sustaining a groin injury, among other injuries. On Sept. 4, she announced she would not return this year.
