NBA Finals Ratings Hampered by Short Series, Small Markets
A short series featuring teams from two secondary media markets somewhat blunted the impact of the 2023 NBA Finals, as deliveries for the Heat-Nuggets showcase were down 6% versus the year-ago title tilt.
According to Nielsen live-plus-same-day data, ABC averaged 11.65 million viewers over the course of the five-game set, coming up about 757,000 viewers shy of the average deliveries for last season’s Celtics-Warriors series. The 2022 NBA Finals averaged 12.40 million viewers.
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The Nuggets earned the first championship in their 56-year history, thanks in large part to Finals MVP Nikola Jokić, who during the series averaged a staggering 30.2 points, 14 rebounds and 7.2 assists. Monday night’s clincher now stands as the NBA’s most-watched game of 2022-23, as ABC served up 13.08 million viewers. That marks the highest TV turnout for a Game 5 since the pre-pandemic era, although still well below the 18.22 million viewers who tuned in to the analogous Warriors-Raptors broadcast in 2019.
Game 5 peaked with 17.83 million viewers, as casual fans flipped over to ABC at game’s end to watch Jokić and Jamal Murray make history within the friendly confines of Ball Arena. The taciturn Jokić initially celebrated by telling everyone within earshot that he just wanted to go back home to Serbia, although the big fella later got into the spirit of things when he dragged Murray into the Nuggets’ training pool.
Having fallen short of last year’s deliveries, the Miami-Denver series now ranks as the fifth least-watched Finals of the modern Nielsen era, which kicked off with the introduction of the portable people meter in 1987. Disregarding the asterisk-laden 2020 and 2021 Finals series, Miami-Denver only managed to top the Spurs’ sweep of the Cavs in 2007 (9.29 million viewers) and the little-seen Spurs-Nets pairing in 2003 (9.86 million).
A sixth game likely would have brought this year’s Finals flush with 2022’s edition—while also pumping another $50 million-$60 million of ad revenue into ABC’s coffers—but it wasn’t to be. Still, that the series’ deliveries were off in the mid-single digits versus the year-ago set can be seen as a small victory, considering that overall TV usage in the same period was down 11%.
If the absence of the NBA’s two biggest ratings drivers (the Lakers and Warriors) all but guaranteed a lower turnout for this year’s Finals, the relatively small home markets didn’t help matters, either. The Denver DMA is home to 1.79 million TV households, while Miami is a bit smaller (1.72 million). Together, the two markets have 40% fewer TV homes than Los Angeles (5.84 million).
All told, the NBA postseason averaged 5.46 million viewers per game across ESPN, ABC and TNT, up 7% versus last year’s 5.12 million. At the conclusion of the conference finals, overall playoff deliveries were up 11% year-over-year.
In what can only be characterized as a successful season, the NBA broke its all-time attendance record with 22 million trips through the turnstiles, while arena capacity reached 97%. Team sponsorship revenue also hit an unprecedented high, improving 10.5% to $1.4 billion.
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