The 2024 NBA Finals between the Boston Celtics and Dallas Mavericks averaged 11.31 million viewers across the five-game series on ABC, including a simulcast of Game 3 on ESPN, down 3% in year-over-year viewership. Additionally, the series had a 5.8 rating, representing a 5% year-over-year decline in this category. Excluding the 2020 and 2021 NBA Finals, this series was the lowest-rated on record and the least-watched since the San Antonio Spurs faced the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2007, according to Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch. Chris Curtis, producer of The Greg Hill Show on WEEI, revealed more information about the NBA Finals ratings during the program’s live show on Friday morning.
Curtis discovered that the Boston market had a 17.7 rating throughout the five-game NBA Finals series, which he explained compiles linear viewership and streaming data. Drawing a comparison against other significant Boston sports games in the last five years, he mentioned how the Boston Red Sox championship victory against the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 5 of the 2018 World Series had a 43.2 share in the marketplace. Although Nielsen Media Research was tracking out-of-home viewership at the time, it did not begin implementing the metric into its viewership estimates until 2020. Curtis also said the 2018 AFC Championship Game between the New England Patriots and Kansas City Chiefs garnered a 58.5 rating in Boston.
“With baseball, it’s the only sport we ever talk about how their ratings are declining and the sport’s dying,” Curtis continued. “If Major League Baseball just had these [NBA] Finals [as] their World Series, it would be the pullout national story about it, but because it’s not baseball, we just don’t talk about it. The Red Sox last playoff run in 2021, the one-game Wild Card against the Yankees, did a 19.8, so the one-game play-in to the playoffs did a higher number than the average rating of the five NBA Finals games in Boston.”
Greg Hill asked Curtis for his reasoning behind the phenomenon, to which he replied that he was not sure. In fact, he thought that the nine-day buildup to the first game of the NBA Finals would have an anticipation resembling the Super Bowl. One possibility could be that the series was not always the most competitive, although he immediately stated that he still had no idea.
“I think that the Celtics were so much better than Dallas, people were like, ‘This series is not going to be good,’” co-host Jermaine Wiggins said.
“But if you’re Boston, you want to see that,” co-host Courtney Cox replied. “You want to see them be dominant, so that’s why I don’t know why the Boston number was just so low.”
Show producer Chris Scheim wondered if the 8:30 p.m. EST start time for the games could have an impact. Curtis did not believe this to be the case and revealed additional ratings data related to the five-game series in the process.
“Every one of these games in the Finals and the World Series and the playoffs have all been 8:30 starts, and Providence did a 12,” Curtis said. “So Boston was a 17.7; Providence was a 12. Just very interesting – I don’t know what it means.”
