Sunday’s Game 5 of the WNBA Finals delivered huge viewership numbers with the highest ratings of the championship series since it aired on NBC in the 1990s.
ESPN announced Tuesday that an average of 2.2 million viewers tuned in on Sunday night, with a peak of 3.3 million viewers for the winner-take-all game between the New York Liberty and Minnesota Lynx. New York won in overtime to claim the franchise’s first championship.
According to ESPN, this represents a 142% viewership increase over last season’s Game 4 clincher for the Las Vegas Aces over the Liberty. According to Front Office Sports, it is the highest rated WNBA Finals game since the decisive Game 3 in 1999 between the Liberty and Houston Comets, which aired on NBC and drew 3.25 million viewers.
Game 1 of the Lynx-Liberty series drew 1.14 million viewers, with ratings steadily rising each game through Sunday’s Game 5. According to FOS, the ratings pale in comparison to those of the 2023 WNBA Finals, which were previously the most watched in decades. None of the 2023 Finals games drew 1 million viewers, with the average viewership peaking at 889,000 in the deciding Game 4.
How will the ratings influence the CBA conversations?
The Finals ratings cap off a year of explosive growth for the WNBA, fueled in part by the Caitlin Clark phenomenon. The Indiana Fever rookie, who became a college sensation in Iowa, generated unprecedented interest in the league and contributed significantly to its growth this season.
Indiana’s Game 2 against the Connecticut Sun in September averaged 2.54 million viewers and peaked at 3.5 million. It marked the largest audience ever for a WNBA game on cable.
But the playoff scores during the finals continued to show that the league’s growth is not strictly dependent on Clark. Clark’s Fever hasn’t played since being eliminated by the Sun in that Game 2, and viewers continued to show up in breakout numbers through the end of the postseason.
The spike in interest rates and the money that interest generates has contributed to a changing financial atmosphere that prompted the WNBPA to opt out of the collective bargaining agreement with the league on Monday. The WNBA recently announced expansion franchises in Portland, Toronto and California’s Bay Area and signed a new media rights deal worth approximately $200 million per year, up from its previous deal worth approximately $60 million per season .
The WNBPA will certainly point to the league’s postseason ratings as it makes its case in negotiating a bigger piece of the pie.
