Photo by Joe Murphy/NBAE via Getty Images
Everyone is still watching the NBA, even without a huge team.
The NBA Finals were supposed to be in shambles. Remember? Remember that? When Celtics fans insisted that this would be the death knell of the postseason because nobody would watch Miami and Denver? WRONG!
With two games in the books the 2023 NBA Finals are pulling mammoth numbers. Game 1 averaged 11.5M viewers, which grew in Game 2 to 11.9M. Obviously people really care about this series, as it’s pulling almost equal numbers to the 2022 Finals, which featured much larger markets with the Warriors and Celtics.
Would you look at that?
The numbers for Game 2 are in, equaling last year’s average of 11.9 million viewers. The audience number peaked at 15,256,000 on Sunday, per ESPN PR. https://t.co/IyPl7net2F
— mateo mayorga (@mateomayorga23) June 6, 2023
Ratings may be slightly down overall compared to the 2018 finals between the Warriors and Cavaliers — but this series is proving that people still enjoy watching the best two teams in the NBA, even without household names, or a massive media market to prop up the ratings.
So far, the series has been amazing. We’re tied at 1-1, with Miami proving they can bounce back following an embarrassing performance to open the series. It’s a fascinating battle between Nikola Jokic, arguably the league’s best player — and the coaching brilliance of Eric Spoelstra, who continues to find ways to get his group of players to vastly exceed what their talent level on paper would have you believe.
We can go ahead and keep these figures in the back of our minds the next time someone says a sport is “ruined” because it doesn’t have the backing of a huge market. It’s all total BS and copium for fans upset their team didn’t advance.
