The National Basketball Association’s (NBA) regular season wrapped up last Sunday, with the competition shifting to the NBA play-in tournament to determine the seventh and eighth seeds of the playoffs and teams readying to compete for their conference championship and the NBA Finals.
At the same time, the NBA finds itself competing for viewers: Throughout the season, the league was beset by news reports that basketball fans were tuning out because of difficulties accessing games on regional and national sports providers coupled with relatively uninteresting storylines and match-ups.
A new report from Front Office Sports takes a 30,000-foot view at the NBA’s ratings for the 2024-25 season, finding that around 1.53 million viewers tuned in to watch nationally-televised games on the networks of the Walt Disney Company (ESPN, ABC) and Warner Bros Discovery (TNT Sports).
The figure represents a year-over loss of 2 percent, weighed by lower viewership on TNT Sports (down 8 percent) and ESPN (down 7 percent), partially offset by higher interest in NBA Saturday Primetime and NBC Sunday Showcase games on ABC (up 10 percent).
Owed largely to the reach and accessibility of broadcast TV, the games on ABC attracted the highest average audience across the national rights holders, with around 2.7 million people tuning in to watch NBA games, according to Nielsen data. The network aired 24 games, which were produced by ESPN.
The average audience for games aired on TNT Sports was 1.3 million viewers, the Nielsen ratings showed. The 2024-25 season is the last for WBD, with its games departing TNT Sports for new homes on Comcast’s NBC and Peacock and on Amazon’s Prime Video.
WBD will continue to offer NBA games in some overseas markets, and ESPN and ABC will continue serving as domestic broadcast partners of some NBA games in the U.S.
Less clear is what happens to NBA TV, which is owned by the league and operated by WBD. The channel offered a handful of games simulcast from regional sports broadcasters during the 2024-25 season, with those events attracting an average audience of 240,000 viewers per game, Nielsen data showed.
While the viewership figures are not particularly exciting for the NBA, the audience erosion is still less than what the National Football League experienced during its most-recent season. The average audience of an NFL game on TV was around 17.5 million during the 2024 season, down 2.2 percent from the 17.9 million viewers logged per game during the prior season.
