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Stanley Cup & NBA Finals Average Record Low Viewership Across 5-Game Series

Katie Campione
·2 min read

It’s a tough time for live sports. Both the NBA Finals and the Stanley Cup Finals ended this week with historically low viewership across each five-game series.

On Tuesday night, the Vegas Golden Knights took home the Stanley Cup in Game 5 of the NHL Finals, winning a fourth match against the Florida Panthers. That game drew 2.72M viewers across TNT and TruTV, which marks the lowest audience for a Game 5 of the Cup Final in 29 years, since the Canucks-Rangers Game 5 drew 2.41M viewers on ESPN in 1994.

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Overall, the five-game series averaged 2.6M viewers, which was down 43% from last year’s six-game Avalanche-Lightning series on ABC. Excluding pandemic-era fanless series, this year’s Cup Final was the least-watched since 2007, when the Ducks-Senators series drew 1.8M viewers.

Earlier this week, the NBA Finals concluded on a similar note, albeit with a small victory. Game 5 of the Finals saw the Denver Nuggets secure the championship against the Miami Heat with 13.08M people watching on ABC. Viewership peaked for the Nuggets-Heat Game 5 with 17.88M viewers at 11 p.m. ET.

The game managed a 1% audience increase versus last year’s Game 5 of the Warriors-Celtics series and marks the most-watched Game 5 of the Finals in four years, since Warriors-Raptors had 18.8M viewers in 2019.

Game 5 was the first of the series to increase from last year, following Game 4’s series low (down 14% from the previous year).

The five-game series averaged 11.64M viewers, which was down overall compared to last year’s Warriors-Celtics six-game matchup. That makes the Heats-Nuggets series one of the least-viewed NBA Finals in more than a decade. Excluding the two out-of-season series that occurred during the pandemic, the audience for an NBA Finals hasn’t been this low since the Spurs-Cavaliers in 2007 with 9.29M viewers.

Despite a record low for the Finals, this year’s NBA Playoffs were the most-watched in five years averaging 5.47M viewers across ABC, ESPN and TNT.

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