WNBA Finals hits 23-year high in Game 2

The following article " WNBA Finals hits 23-year high in Game 2 " originally appeared on Sports Media Watch .

The WNBA Finals continues to score its largest audiences in more than two decades.

Sunday’s Lynx-Liberty WNBA Finals Game 2 averaged a 0.7 rating and 1.35 million viewers on ABC, marking the largest WNBA Finals audience since the clinching Game 2 of the 2001 series on NBC (Sting-Sparks: 1.51M). The previous high was 1.28 million for Game 2 of Sparks-Shock on ABC in 2003. (The 2003 game would likely still rank higher had out-of-home viewing been tracked in Nielsen estimates back then.)

New York’s series-tying win, which peaked with 1.82 million viewers, delivered the eighth-largest audience in Finals history. The Liberty, which on Sunday won a Finals game for just the third time in franchise history, have played in seven of the top 11.

Most-watched WNBA Finals games

Game 2 delivered the second-largest WNBA audience ever on an NFL Sunday, trailing only Fever-Sun Game 1 in the first round of this year’s playoffs, a game that featured Caitlin Clark (1.84M).

It was the most-watched WNBA game this season that did not feature Clark, surpassing the previous high of 1.34 million for a Sparks-Aces game on ABC in May that had a direct lead-in from the Fever rookie. Overall, it ranks 18th for the season behind 15 Fever games, the WNBA All-Star Game and WNBA Draft, all of which included Clark in some form.

A total of 29 WNBA telecasts this season have averaged a seven-figure audience (28 excluding the draft), nearly doubling the previous record for million-viewer windows in a single season — 15 in 1998. It was the fourth of those games that did not feature or follow Clark and the Fever, joining Game 1, an Aces-Sky game on CBS in August (1.22M) and a Mercury-Sun game on ABC in July (1.02M).

Compared to last year’s Liberty-Aces Game 2, a Las Vegas blowout that aired in a Wednesday night window on ESPN, ratings increased 85% and viewership 115% from a 0.40 and 626,000. From 2004-23, the most-watched Game 2 was Sky-Mercury in 2021, which averaged 805,000 on ESPN.

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