The impressive viewership numbers we saw throughout the WNBA regular season have predictably carried over throughout postseason. And in Game 1 of the WNBA Finals on ESPN between the Minnesota Lynx and the New York Liberty on Thursday night, this only continued despite going head to head with Thursday Night Football and an MLB postseason game.
While some have chosen to point out the fact that viewership has declined after the Indiana Fever and Caitlin Clark were eliminated in the first round of the postseason, year-over-year viewership has grown throughout each round of the playoffs.
It seems like that is set to be the case once again in the WNBA Finals. According to Sports Media Watch, Game 1 of the Lynx-Liberty series on ABC and ESPN averaged 1.14 million viewers, the most for a Game 1 in the WNBA Finals ever.
Overall, it ranks as the most-watched WNBA Finals game since a Game 3 matchup in the 2003 WNBA Finals between the Los Angeles Sparks and the Detroit Shock.
It is just the third game without Caitlin Clark involved this season to bring in over a million viewers. This obviously speaks to the impact that Clark has had on ratings in the WNBA. But to put these impressive viewership numbers into perspective, it was just five years ago that the WNBA had just 238,000 average viewers tune into Game 1 of the 2019 WNBA Finals between the Connecticut Sun and the Washington Mystics.
It certainly helps that the action on the court Thursday night was incredibly entertaining, coming down to the final seconds in overtime.
But either way, the WNBA is very clearly in a far better position than it has been in quite some time when it comes to popularity and viewership around the sport. So it should be very interesting to see whether these ratings carry on throughout the series.
About Reice Shipley
Reice Shipley is a staff writer for Comeback Media that graduated from Ithaca College with a degree in Sports Media. He previously worked at Barrett Sports Media and is a fan of all things Syracuse sports.