{"id":723472,"date":"2026-06-08T17:39:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T17:39:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/723472\/"},"modified":"2026-06-08T17:39:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T17:39:08","slug":"knicks-spurs-delivers-abc-most-watched-nba-finals-game-1-since-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/723472\/","title":{"rendered":"Knicks-Spurs delivers ABC most-watched NBA Finals Game 1 since 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-media \">The Knicks\u2019 come-from-behind win over the Spurs in Game 1 of the NBA Finals delivered the best Game 1 audience since 2018, with ABC averaging 16.9 million viewers. The superlative dates back to Warriors-Cavaliers Game 1, which drew 17.4 million viewers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-media \">Knicks-Spurs Game 1 even had a better audience than Game 7 of the Thunder-Pacers NBA Finals last year (16.4 million for that), and is up 90% from just 8.9 million for last year\u2019s Finals opener, which was the least-watched Game 1 on record. Wednesday night\u2019s Game 1 peaked at 19.6 million viewers at 11pm ET. Game 1 gave ABC an easy primetime win. It\u2019s also the best NBA Finals audience of any kind since the clinching Game 6 of the 2019 Raptors-Warriors series (18.3 million). <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph sections-media \">Beyond basketball, the 16.9 million viewers for Knicks-Spurs Game 1 is the same audience that the most-recent Alabama-Georgia SEC Football Championship on ABC in December. The Knicks-Spurs opener even has a good chance of cracking the 100 most-watched telecasts of the year. <\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Knicks\u2019 come-from-behind win over the Spurs in Game 1 of the NBA Finals delivered the best Game&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":723473,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,726,111376,350418,794,12845,590,85,24942],"class_list":["post-723472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-basketball","tag-data-and-insights","tag-data-sets","tag-espn","tag-knicks","tag-nba","tag-sports","tag-spurs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=723472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723472\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/723473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=723472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=723472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=723472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}