The NBA saw its best slate of Christmas Day games since 2018, even as the NFL had three games airing up against the five hardwood games. ABC\/ESPN\/ESPN2 averaged 5.5 million viewers for five games on Christmas, which is the league\u2019s best figure since 5.8 million in 2018 and up 4% from 5.3 million last season. The three afternoon windows saw gains, while the primetime windows were down. <\/p>\n
The top game was a showdown of the Spurs and Thunder at 2:30pm ET on ESPN\/ABC, with that game drawing 6.7 million viewers. That\u2019s the best NBA Christmas game in that window since Cavaliers-Warriors in 2017 drew 8.8 million. <\/p>\n
Coming in at No. 2 was the Cavaliers-Knicks game at noon with 6.4 million, which also carried the \u201cDunk The Halls\u201d animated alt-cast on ESPN2, Disney and DisneyXD (280,000 viewers, up 25% from the alt-cast last season). That helped Cavs-Knicks deliver the best noon Christmas Day NBA game on record. The Knicks have now played in the noon Christmas window for the past five holidays. Mavericks-Warriors drew 6.1 million viewers at 5pm, which is the best game in that window since 2019. At 8pm, Rockets-Lakers drew 5.4 million, down sharply from 7.8 million for Lakers-Warriors in the same window in 2024. And in the late primetime window, T\u2019Wolves-Nuggets drew 3.6 million, down a tick from 3.8 million for Suns-Nuggets in the same window last season. <\/p>\n
The five-pack of NBA games reached 47.2 million unique viewers on Christmas, which is the best for the holiday since the season started on Christmas in 2011 and up 45% from last season. Data from Videocites shows the NBA was the most-visible brand on social media on Christmas at over 1.6 billion views. The games also had its best Christmas Day share — the percentage of viewers with TVs in use that are watching a specific program — since 2004.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The NBA saw its best slate of Christmas Day games since 2018, even as the NFL had three…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":383693,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[434],"tags":[49,48,1161,459,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-383692","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-espn","11":"tag-nba","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383692\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/383693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}