TV Ratings: NBA Finals Dip Year to Year as Denver Nuggets Clinch First Title
The Denver Nuggets’ clinching of their first title gave ABC its biggest audience of the 2023 NBA Finals — but the series as a whole was down a little from a year ago.
The Nuggets’ 94-89 victory over the Miami Heat — sealing a 4-1 series win and the franchise’s first NBA championship — averaged 13.08 million viewers Monday night, a high for the series and slightly ahead of last year’s fifth game between the Golden State Warriors and Boston Celtics (13.02 million). The broadcast peaked with 17.83 million viewers for the final minutes of the game.
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The five-game series averaged about 11.64 million viewers, down 6 percent from 12.4 million for the 2022 Finals. The relatively short series and the fact that the two teams are outside the biggest media markets — Denver and Miami rank 14th and 16th among NBA cities in market size — likely played a part in the declines.
Still, the Finals dominated linear TV on all five nights it aired, with only one other program (CBS’ 60 Minutes Presents on June 4) averaging even half as many viewers as that night’s game. The series scored a 3.58 rating among adults 18-49, or about 4.67 million viewers in the key ad-sales demographic.
The 2023 series ranks in the bottom five among NBA Finals viewership since total viewers began to be regularly tracked in the late 1980s. It’s ahead of the pandemic-affected series of 2020 (7.45 million viewers, the all-time low) and 2021 (9.91 million) and those in 2003 (9.29 million) and 2007 (9.86 million).
On the plus side for the NBA, the playoffs as a whole improved year to year. Coverage of all four rounds across ABC, ESPN and TNT averaged 5.47 million viewers, a five-year high (with the caveat that out of home viewing wasn’t regularly included in Nielsen’s ratings until 2020). The play-in games, counted separately from the main playoff rounds, also edged up to 2.61 million viewers from 2.5 million last year.
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