The Indiana Fever’s season home opener at the Connecticut Sun was the most-watched Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) game on ESPN in history, the network said in a statement.
The game averaged 2.1 million viewers across ESPN 2 on cable and the streaming platforms ESPN Plus and Disney Plus. At its peak, 2.3 million households were tuned in to watch Caitlin Clark’s first-ever WNBA game.
ESPN said it was the network’s most-watched WNBA regular season or playoff game, surpassing a previous record held by the Phoenix Mercury and Connecticut Sun set in 2004.
Clark likely had a lot to do with ESPN’s success: A second game between the Phoenix Mercury and Las Vegas Aces grabbed just 464,000 viewers for the night.
Between the two games, ESPN grabbed an average of 1.28 million viewers, up 192 percent when compared to last year’s viewership average.
