WNBA Finals opener is most-watched since league’s inaugural year

For all the tumult off the court, the WNBA audience keeps growing in ways that would have been hard to fathom just three years ago.

Friday’s Mercury-Aces WNBA Finals Game 1 averaged 1.9 million viewers on ESPN, up 62% from Lynx-Liberty last year (1.1M) and the most-watched Finals opener since the inaugural edition in 1997, a single-elimination Liberty-Comets game that averaged 2.8 million on NBC.

While Nielsen’s February expansion of out-of-home viewing and September rollout of “Big Data + Panel” mean that this year’s numbers have a built-in advantage over prior seasons, that would not fully account for such a large increase.

The Aces’ win, which peaked with 2.5 million viewers, delivered the second-largest Finals audience overall since 2000 — behind only last year’s winner-take-all Game 5 (2.2M) — and ranks seventh all-time. Four of the top ten have come in the past two years, with Games 3 and 4 of last year’s series also making the list.

There are few properties in all of sports that have seen as sharp an increase in viewership over the past ten years as the WNBA Finals. Game 1 of the 2019 Sun-Mystics WNBA Finals averaged just 238,000 on ESPN. When Aces-Storm opened with 351,000 in the 2020 “bubble,” that constituted a 48 percent increase and three-year high.

WNBA Finals Game 1 viewership, past decade

That 2019 Sun-Mystics finals was the most-recent to open with a year-over-year decline, failing to meet the bar of 246,000 set by Mystics-Storm the prior year — a game that aired mostly on ESPNews. In each year since, Game 1 of the Finals has increased double-digits over the prior year, rising the aforementioned 48% in 2020, 33% in 2021 (to 469K), 18% in 2022 (to 555,000), 31% in 2023 (to 729K), 56% in 2024 (to 1.1M) and finally 62% this year.

Again, Nielsen’s methodological changes play a role — 2019 was also the final year before Nielsen began including out-of-home viewing in its estimates — but those are not going to fully explain increases of such size.

Overall, the increase in viewership from Game 1 in 2019 to Game 1 in 2025 is nearly 700 percent.

WNBA playoff games are now averaging 1.2 million viewers, up 16% from last year, with the caveats regarding Nielsen methodological changes.