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An incredible attendance and viewership year for the WNBA came to an end on Sunday when the New York Liberty finished off the Minnesota Lynx to win the championship in a winner-take-all fifth game of the series aired on ESPN. New York won the game in overtime 67-62. The game drew an average audience of 2.2 million viewers, making it the most watched WNBA Finals game since 1999.
The game peaked at 3.3 million viewers. It was up 142% over last season’s series-deciding game 4 on ESPN.
The Liberty-Lynx game on ESPN was the fourth-largest audience ever for a WNBA Finals game, the others belonging to NBC. The only WNBA Finals game to draw more than 3 million viewers, on average, continues to be Game 3 of the New York-Houston series on Sept. 5, 1999, which averaged 3.25 million.
The regular season saw the WNBA average 1.19 million viewers on ESPN platforms, 1.1 million on CBS Sports and 670,000 on ION. 22 regular season games averaged at least one million viewers, many of those featuring rookie sensation Caitlin Clark of the Indiana Fever. League attendance was up 48% over the prior season.
