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Despite airing in the thick of an NFL Sunday, Caitlin Clark’s playoff debut still delivered a milestone audience for the WNBA.
Sunday’s Fever-Sun first round WNBA playoff Game 1 averaged 1.84 million viewers on ABC, marking the largest WNBA playoff audience in any round since the deciding Game 2 of the 2000 WNBA Finals (Liberty-Comets: 2.12M), and the most-watched outside of the WNBA Finals since Game 2 of the Sparks-Comets 1999 Western Conference Final (2.62M).
Indiana’s win was the most-watched WNBA game to ever air on an NFL Sunday, surpassing Game 2 of the 2003 WNBA Finals (Sparks-Shock: 1.28M).
It was the 24th WNBA game this season to cross the million-viewer threshold (and 25th total telecast including the WNBA Draft), with Caitlin Clark having played in all-but-three (23 Fever games and the WNBA All-Star Game).
Prior to this season, the record for million-viewer audiences in a WNBA season was 15 in 1998. No game had hit the million-viewer mark since 2008.
Compared to ABC’s lone first round game last year — Sky-Aces Game 2 — viewership increased fourfold from 426,000.
The Clark effect did not carry over into the other playoff games Sunday, none of which cracked the 500,000 mark. Storm-Aces topped the rest of the day’s slate with 461,000 viewers in ESPN’s post-Sunday Night Baseball window, Dream-Liberty drew 410,000 following Sunday NFL Countdown and Mercury-Lynx rounded out the day with 403,000.
While those figures pale in comparison to the Clark game, they cruised past the eight other first round openers under the current WNBA playoff format that began in 2022 — the most-watched of which was Mercury-Aces Game 1 two years ago (398K). It bears noting that those previous first round openers aired midweek and primarily on ESPN2.
(Prior to 2022, the WNBA had a single-elimination first round — in which the top four seeds had a bye — from 2016-21.)
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