A five-month Fever finally subsided Thursday, but not before generating one more milestone audience for the WNBA.<\/p>\n
Thursday\u2019s Fever-Aces first round WNBA playoff Game 3 averaged 2.25 million viewers on USA Network, per Nielsen panel-only data, marking the third-largest WNBA playoff audience on record outside of the WNBA Finals \u2014 trailing only Fever-Sun Game 2 on ESPN in the first round two years ago (2.54M) and Sparks-Comets Game 2 on NBC in the 1999 Western Conference Finals (2.62M).<\/p>\n
The official Nielsen \u201cBig Data + Panel\u201d viewership figures will not be out until Monday. As a general rule, \u201cBig Data + Panel\u201d figures are higher than their panel-only equivalents, though that is not always the case.<\/p>\n
The Aces\u2019 win, which peaked with 2.7 million in the 11:15 PM ET quarter-hour, delivered the fourth-largest WNBA audience ever on cable \u2014 trailing Fever-Dream on ESPN this past season (2.58M), the aforementioned Fever-Sun Game 2 in 2024, and Fever-Sky on ESPN earlier that same year (2.30M). That is despite airing opposite both NFL \u201cThursday Night Football\u201d on Prime Video and a winner-take-all MLB Postseason game on NBC (Phillies-Braves).<\/p>\n
Outside of the Olympics, Game 3 was the most-watched sporting event on USA Sports this year.<\/p>\n
By comparison, last year\u2019s winner-take-all game between the Aces and Fever \u2014 a semifinal Game 5 that did not feature an injured Caitlin Clark \u2014 averaged 1.83 million on ESPN2. The Fever also played a winner-take-all Game 3 in the first round last season, with their win over Atlanta averaging 1.2 million on ESPN (also sans-Clark).<\/p>\n
Game 2 of the series on Tuesday night averaged 1.42 million on Amazon Prime Video, the largest WNBA audience yet on the streamer, despite a 6:30 PM ET start time and overlap with a Red Sox-Yankees MLB playoff game. That is actually down from last year\u2019s Fever-Dream Game 2 on ESPN, which did not feature the injured Clark (1.5M), but also did not face any MLB playoff competition.<\/p>\n
Later in the night, Lynx-Liberty Game 2 averaged 1.06 million on USA Network, about even with Aces-Storm on ESPN last year (1.1M). Both Tuesday night games easily outpaced each of the three NHL Opening Night games airing in competing windows on ESPN.<\/p>\n
In other action, Wednesday\u2019s Valkyries-Wings Game 2 averaged 1.4 million on ESPN, preceded by Dream-Mystics at 1.2 million. Game 1 of Mystics-Dream drew 425,000 on Prime Video Sunday evening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A five-month Fever finally subsided Thursday, but not before generating one more milestone audience for the WNBA. Thursday\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":918584,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[49,287356,48,95432,82,630,196155,96660,247431],"class_list":["post-918583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-ca","tag-caitlin-clark-ratings","tag-canada","tag-fever-tv-ratings","tag-sports","tag-wnba","tag-wnba-on-espn","tag-wnba-on-prime-video","tag-wnba-on-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918583","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=918583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/918583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/918584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=918583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=918583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=918583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}