NBA sweeps Top 10 sporting events in early May ratings

Credit: imagn images via Reuters Connect

There has been enough debate about NBA ratings this season to fill an election cycle over the past year. But with the playoffs upon us, the league has to be feeling great about its current positioning in the greater sports landscape.

The NBA has seen ratings go up across the postseason amongst its partners at NBC, ESPN, and Amazon. Increased primetime network exposure has certainly provided a lift, but cable and streaming numbers have been solid as well. This followed a strong regular season as well.

There have been plenty of skeptics that have been claiming the sky is falling around the NBA for a long time and trying to draw the league into a feud with Major League Baseball over which sport is superior. However, the most recent numbers definitively prove that the NBA is in a very healthy place when it comes to national television viewership.

In Nielsen ratings from May 4-10, the NBA swept the entire Top 10 of most-watched sports telecast according to a tweet from Yahoo’s Shlomo Sprung. It was topped by Game 4 in the Spurs-Timberwolves western conference semifinal series drawing 6.59 million viewers on NBC.

In fact, if you look at the full Top 25 from Nielsen on the top sporting events of the week, the NBA postseason took the Top 12 spots with the Cavaliers-Pistons series taking places 11 and 12 in the list. The top non-NBA event was the final round of the Truist Championship with 3.38 million viewers on Sunday. Another interesting wrinkle is the Wings-Fever game on ABC at 2.49 million viewers topped every comparable NHL playoff game during the week that was. The top hockey game came from the Flyers-Hurricanes conference semifinals at 2.35 million viewers.

Of course, if you put these numbers up against what football games would draw in the fall, there would be no comparison. But that would be true of any sport outside of the NFL and college football. And the NBA numbers are going to only go up once this week’s data is collected given NBC has already drawn games that have surpassed 7 million viewers.

Sports ratings are becoming an increasingly complex realm when it comes to judging who is really doing well and who isn’t when you factor in the streaming era, Big Data viewership boosts, and a myriad of narratives that can be created depending on what you want the numbers to say. But in a real-time apples to apples comparison, the NBA in the first year of its new TV deals appears to be doing very, very well against the competition.

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