The NBA’s viewership was in a bad place early this season, but a surge since Christmas has brought ratings nearly even with last year—and potentially ready to climb next season. We explain why.
The NBA drew a ton of criticism after double-digit viewership declines through the first two months of the season, but with the campaign wrapped up, the league still finished close to equal with last year.
The 2024–2025 NBA regular season averaged 1.53 million viewers on ABC, ESPN, and TNT, a 2% decline from last year’s 1.56 million average, a source told Front Office Sports.
While the NBA’s regular-season viewership numbers have hovered around the 1.5 million to 1.6 million mark for the last four years, these numbers are still down from the end of the last decade, anchored by the rivalry of the Steph Curry–led Warriors and LeBron James–led Cavaliers.
The NBA’s slight viewership dip can be tied to cord-cutting and declining cable audiences. Games airing exclusively on ESPN saw a 7% decline, but ESPN networks were flat overall due to 24 simulcasts with ABC. TNT games dropped by 8%. ABC pulled up the viewership numbers by averaging 2.68 million viewers across 24 games, a 10% increase compared to last year.
Christmas Day was a turning point in the NBA’s season despite competition from the NFL. The NBA’s five-game slate averaged 5.32 million viewers, an 87% increase from last year. It helped that all five games were on ABC compared to two the prior year, though it still outpaced the 2023 Christmas games that were also all aired on ABC.
NBA viewership numbers may drastically change next year as the league’s new 11-year, $77 billion media-rights deal with ESPN, NBCUniversal, and Amazon Prime kicks in. NBC provides a second free-to-air channel for the NBA to broadcast its games, but many more games will fall behind a streaming paywall with Prime Video and Peacock.
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The latest WNBA rookie phenom is also now a centerpiece of a sports media overhaul underway in Dallas.
As the Dallas Wings selected UConn star Paige Bueckers with the first pick of Monday’s WNBA draft, the choice also confirmed a viewership influx likely coming to KFAA-TV, a Tegna-owned television station in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. The Wings and KFAA agreed to a rights deal in February, providing the over-the-air station with all of the team’s games not designated for national broadcast.
The agreement represented the latest in a wave of deals for every major pro team in the Dallas area, the No. 4 U.S. media market, with the exception of the NFL’s Cowboys, that turned away from traditional, cable-based local media models in favor of broadcast, streaming, and hybrid approaches.
Bueckers may not have quite the massive mainstream popularity of Caitlin Clark, but she is a highly accomplished star, including leading the Huskies last week to an NCAA title, and she marks the latest wave of top-tier talent reaching the WNBA.
KFAA is poised to see a sizable bump in viewers as the Wings are currently slated to have 28 of their 44 games in 2025 on the local station. That presence is being supplemented by additional local-market agreements elsewhere in Texas, including in Austin, Houston, and San Antonio.
“We’re just really excited for the game, the eyes on women’s basketball,” said Wings GM Curt Miller after making the Bueckers pick. “As someone that’s been in the game 35 years, I’ve always been very bullish that our product is outstanding, but now, we have more fandom. We have more eyes on our game than ever. Our product’s always been tremendous. We just needed a spark to get more eyes on our game, and we have it now.”
The first televised WNBA event of the 2025 season showed the league’s staying power following a historic year. However, as expected, it couldn’t reach the numbers from last year’s draft that featured Caitlin Clark.
The 2025 WNBA draft, which saw Paige Bueckers selected No. 1 by the Dallas Wings, averaged 1.25M viewers on ESPN on Monday, the second-most-watched draft in league history, ESPN announced Tuesday. This year’s number, however, is down 49% compared to last year’s record 2.45 million viewers. The 2025 draft did draw 119% more viewers than the 2023 WNBA draft.
It’s becoming clear that Clark is a ratings anomaly, and her stardom has left a lasting effect on women’s basketball. But with the WNBA season starting in a month—and considering Clark has not played an official game since Sept. 26—the question may now be whether the viewership will continue to increase in her sophomore season.
It may help that the Fever are expected to be more competitive and could be dark-horse contenders a year after finishing with the No. 6 seed and a .500 record last year. Indiana made a coaching change by bringing in former Coach of the Year Stephanie White and acquiring multiple-time All-Stars DeWanna Bonner and Natasha Howard in the offseason.
Athletes Unlimited chief growth officer Allie Kleva joins Leslie Osborne and Arielle Houlihan to discuss how she has built her career, started her family, and is helping grow women’s professional sports with Athletes Unlimited.
Redefined is a Front Office Sports Network show that celebrates the stories, experiences, and realities of multidimensional women in sports who are redefining success. New episodes release every Wednesday and can be found on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, and the FOS website.
