The Indiana Fever delivered more viewership highs this past week, both with and without Caitlin Clark in the lineup.<\/p>\n
Wednesday\u2019s Fever-Sparks WNBA regular season game \u2014 which marked Caitlin Clark\u2019s return after a two-week absence \u2014 averaged 1.04 million viewers across USA Network and CNBC, the network\u2019s top audience of the season and the league\u2019s largest late night regular season audience on record (start time of 10 PM ET or later).<\/p>\n
Four of the six most-watched games on cable or streaming this season have aired on USA Sports, all involving Clark and the Fever.<\/p>\n
It was the second-straight Fever game to make the list, as their game against the Aces last Sunday night took the top spot \u2014 sans-Clark \u2014 with a 0.8 rating and 1.55 million on ESPN\u2019s \u201cWomen\u2019s Sports Sundays.\u201d Not only was that the largest audience of the season on cable and streaming, but the fifth-largest across all networks.<\/p>\n
Each of the five most-watched games this season have featured the Fever, and while the top three unsurprisingly featured Clark, the other two came during her two-week absence \u2014 last Sunday against the Aces and the prior week against the Sparks on CBS (1.57M). That is a continuation of a trend that began during Clark\u2019s injury-wracked sophomore season, when viewership for non-Clark Fever games still comfortably outpaced the rest of the league.<\/p>\n
Last Sunday\u2019s audience far surpassed the two previous WNBA games on \u201cWomen\u2019s Sports Sundays\u201d \u2014 Liberty-Valkyries the previous week (743K) and Liberty-Sparks two weeks ago (778K).<\/p>\n
The Fever and Aces have a second-straight Sunday night meeting this coming weekend, but on NBC\u2019s \u201cSunday Night Basketball.\u201d<\/p>\n
ESPN and ABC were averaging 1.3 million viewers for WNBA games as of last Sunday, up 6% from the same point last year. Newcomer USA Sports is averaging 512,000 for its games, up 22% from last year\u2019s WNBA average on cable.<\/p>\n
In other recent WNBA action, last Saturday\u2019s Valkyries-Dream game on CBS drew 965,000.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Indiana Fever delivered more viewership highs this past week, both with and without Caitlin Clark in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":757875,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[324557,115805,99,434,8376,118980,105715],"class_list":["post-757874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-caitlin-clark-ratings","tag-fever-tv-ratings","tag-sports","tag-wnba","tag-wnba-on-espn","tag-wnba-on-usa","tag-wnba-ratings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=757874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/757874\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/757875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=757874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=757874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=757874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}