First Round of NBA Playoffs Reaches 33-Year Viewership High

The banner viewership run across sports this spring is gathering more steam as the NBA closed out the first round of its playoffs in historic fashion.

The league said it averaged 4 million viewers per game during the opening round across ABC and ESPN, Amazon Prime Video, and NBC and Peacock. That’s up 22% from a year ago and the best such figure since 1993—well before the rise of streaming. 

The presence of NBC carrying games on broadcast television certainly proved to be meaningful in the overall figure, but the other two major rights holders also posted their own audience gains to help reach the overall milestone.

Series length was also a key factor, as six of the eight first-round matchups went to at least a sixth game—including all four in the Eastern Conference—and three reached a seventh game.

Even before the end of the first round, the NBA’s audience numbers were already trending higher, but the league then received a final flourish from Game 7 of the 76ers-Celtics series last Saturday. That game averaged 11 million viewers on NBC and Peacock, representing the NBA’s most-watched first-round Game 7 ever, and the largest audience for an opening-round game of any type in 27 years.

That Philadelphia-Boston broadcast also benefited mightily from a historic lead-in from the Kentucky Derby, also shown on those same Comcast-owned outlets. The horse race generated a preliminary audience figure of 19.6 million viewers, setting a viewership record for that event. 

In addition to the historic figures deriving from Churchill Downs, the sports viewership tear unfolding in recent weeks also includes the NHL, which just posted a 68% viewership boost in its opening playoff round to set a new high in the current rights deals for ESPN and TNT Sports. The NBA, meanwhile, finished its regular season with a 16% audience boost to reach a seven-year high. 

A major outlier to this trend, surprisingly, is the NFL, which saw the audience for its recent draft fall by 12%—in part due to a relative lack of major name recognition among the selected players after No. 1 pick Fernando Mendoza.

Changing Methods

The sports viewership boosts are also happening amid a still-evolving measurement situation for Nielsen. The agency already has expanded its out-of-home tabulation and introduced the Big Data + Panel process since the beginning of last year. The next step for Nielsen is the likely rollout this fall of an enhanced tabulation of co-viewing within households.  

The latest sports viewership totals, however, are generally seen as outstripping any structural gains coming from Nielsen’s broader procedural improvements.