Thunder, Pacers Roar to 6-Year NBA Finals High With 16.4M Viewers
While the Nielsen data is preliminary—a final readout on the audience numbers will be available Tuesday—the official TV turnout isn't likely to be significantly larger than the figures released Monday afternoon.
ABC's deliveries peaked with 19.3 million viewers in the 9:45 p.m. ET quarter-hour. All told, the Oklahoma City-Indiana series averaged 10.3 million viewers over the course of the seven nights, which marked a 9% decline compared to the year-ago Celtics-Mavericks set. That five-game series averaged 11.3 million viewers.
The Thunder-Pacers showdown now stands as the fifth least-watched Finals in the modern Nielsen era (1988-present). Excluding the pandemic-disrupted 2020 'bubble' series (7.45 million viewers per game) and the delayed 2021 follow-up (9.91 million), which closed out on July 20 of that same year, the only two Finals that this year's event managed to top were the 2003 and 2007 editions. San Antonio's sweep of the latter series kept the average down to just 9.29 million viewers per game, while their 4-2 victory over the Nets in 2003 managed 9.86 million.
Game 7 was the first of this year's Finals to serve up more than 10 million viewers, as ABC throughout the series was hampered by the small-town matchups. Together, the Indianapolis and OKC markets are home to a combined 1.99 million TV households, accounting for just 1.6% of the national base.
Sunday night's game was marred by an injury sustained by the Pacers' Tyrese Haliburton, who early in the first quarter went down with what would prove to be a torn Achilles tendon. In what amounts to a truly miserable coincidence, Haliburton was the third NBA player in the postseason to succumb to a wrecked Achilles while wearing the number 0. Bucks guard Damian Lillard sustained his injury in a first-round loss to Indiana, while Boston's Jayson Tatum ruptured the same tendon in a second-round defeat at Madison Square Garden.
All three stars are expected to miss the entire 2025-26 NBA campaign as they recover from their injuries.
If this year's results are a far cry from previous Game 7s—nine years ago, Cleveland's 93-89 victory over Golden State averaged a staggering 31 million viewers, giving the NBA its biggest national TV audience since Michael Jordan's last hurrah in 1998—Disney still managed to secure the bag over the course of these Finals. Before any necessary make-good considerations were factored into the calculus, ABC's in-game advertising revenue is believed to have added up to some $300 million.
Thanks to the Game 7 boost, the NBA will enjoy bragging rights to a spot among the year's top TV broadcasts for the first time since 2019. The closest the league has come to cracking the century club in recent years was in 2022, when Game 6 of the Warriors-Celtics tilt averaged 14 million viewers, or just eight spots shy of the cutoff.
Over the course of the 34 NBA postseason games that aired across ESPN and ABC between April 19 and June 22, the Disney networks averaged 6.12 million viewers per outing, good for a 10% improvement compared to 2024.
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