WNBA Playoff Ratings Tank Without Caitlin Clark, Indiana Fever

To everyone’s lack of surprise, the WNBA playoffs had low ratings on Sunday after Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever were eliminated.

The Connecticut Sun defeated the Fever in the first round with a score of two games to zero in the three-game series. The league’s playoffs are still ongoing, but it seems like a significant portion of the fan base has already shifted their attention elsewhere.

To the surprise of no one, the WNBA playoffs didn’t draw very good ratings on Sunday, since Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever were eliminated.

(Erica Denhoff/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

The New York Liberty won against the Las Vegas Aces in the first game of their best-of-five second-round series. Later, the Sun triumphed over the Minnesota Lynx.

The Aces-Liberty game started at 3 p.m. ET on ABC, while the Sun-Lynx game began at 8:30 on ESPN.

Both games directly competed with NFL football.

The ABC broadcast attracted an average of 929,000 viewers, which is considered a good number for the WNBA. However, this was nearly a 50% drop from the previous Sunday’s Fever-Sun game.

Sun-Lynx drew just over 650,000 viewers.

Not only did viewership decline, but attendance did as well. The Sun-Lynx game had 8,500 fans in attendance, which is less than half of the Target Center’s total capacity in Minneapolis (20,000).

The Liberty-Aces game at the Barclays Center had a better turnout, but it did not sell out despite being one of the most highly-anticipated playoff series featuring two teams expected to compete for the WNBA Championship.

According to ESPN, the attendance was 14,015 fans, slightly below 75% of the arena’s capacity.

Going up against NFL football did not pose a significant issue for Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever, who managed to attract nearly two million viewers the previous Sunday during Clark’s playoff debut against the Connecticut Sun.

The game aired simultaneously (3 p.m.) and on the same network (ABC) as the Aces-Liberty match.

According to Sports Media Watch, the Fever’s loss in game one against Connecticut had an average of 1.84 million viewers, making it the highest viewership for a WNBA playoff game since 2000 and almost doubling the Aces-Liberty game.

This record was broken a few days later when the Sun eliminated the Fever on Wednesday in front of an average audience of 2.54 million viewers, the largest playoff audience in over 25 years.

Sunday’s Aces-Liberty WNBA playoff game didn’t draw nearly as many TV viewers as the Indiana Fever and Caitlin Clark drew one week prior.

(Evan Yu/NBAE via Getty Images)

It comes as no surprise that Caitlin Clark is the WNBA’s biggest draw by a significant margin. Throughout the season, the league broke numerous viewership records, with almost every game that exceeded one million viewers featuring the Indiana Fever and Caitlin Clark.

Without her presence in the WNBA playoffs, most sports fans have reverted back to their usual programming: football.

The positive aspect for the league is that attracting nearly one million viewers without Clark is still impressive. However, there is an evident impact from the “Caitlin Clark Effect.”

The downside is that the MLB playoffs began on Tuesday, and the NBA and NHL are also approaching their return to play. This period is already jam-packed with sporting events, and without Caitlin Clark, the WNBA is likely to take a backseat as it has in previous years.