Monday’s NBA Finals telecast drew the most important TV viewers for a finals recreation three in virtually 30 years.
ABC and ESPN‘s broadcast of the San Antonio Spurs’ 115-111 victory over the New York Knicks averaged 23.79 million viewers, together with 1.1 million for an alternate telecast on ESPN. The final time the third recreation of the collection had extra viewers was again in 1998, when Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls put their notorious 96-54 beatdown of the Utah Jazz en path to a second three-peat as NBA champions.
Monday’s recreation peaked with 26.3 million viewers at 11:15 p.m. ET, the closing minutes of the competition. In ABC’s 24-year historical past of broadcasting the NBA Finals, the earlier excessive for a recreation three was 20.05 million viewers in 2017 (Golden State-Cleveland).
Via three video games — the collection will go at the least 5 after San Antonio’s win Monday — the NBA Finals are averaging about 19.1 million viewers. That’s second solely to the 2017 finals, which averaged 19.48 million over their first three video games.
This 12 months’s finals are at present bringing in additional than double the quantity of viewers than the 2025 collection, which featured the Oklahoma Metropolis Thunder and Indiana Pacers, groups from two of the NBA’s smaller media markets. San Antonio is a comparatively small market as nicely, however the Spurs have each a championship historical past (5 titles since 1999) and one of many recreation’s greatest stars in Victor Wembanyama. New York, after all, is the most important TV market within the U.S. by a fairly broad margin and is attempting to finish a 53-year title drought.
Sport 4 of the collection is Wednesday evening in New York, with recreation 5 scheduled for Saturday in San Antonio. If vital, video games six and 7 would occur June 16 and 19.
