One does not generally associate the NBA with Thanksgiving, but the holiday week was the league’s most-watched outside of Opening Night and Christmas in seven years.
NBA games averaged 2.19 million viewers during Thanksgiving week (including Adobe Analytics streaming viewership for NBC games), marking the most-watched week of any NBA season — excluding Opening Week and the week of Christmas — since November 2018. That was also Thanksgiving week, but it included only two games, one of which was LeBron James’ first return to Cleveland as a member of the Lakers.
This year’s Thanksgiving week included seven games in six windows across NBCUniversal, ESPN and Prime Video, with five of those topping the two million mark — the most in any regular season week, again excluding Opening Week and Christmas, since January 2016.
Keep in mind that Nielsen did not begin including out-of-home viewing in its estimates until 2020 and did not do so in 100 percent of markets until earlier this year. In addition, the company shifted to a “Big Data + Panel” methodology in September that combines its traditional panel with data from smart TVs, set-top boxes, and some providers’ internal first-party viewership (including Amazon). These changes generally viewership figures a leg up in all comparisons to prior years.
The week included viewership highs in one form or another on each of Amazon Prime Video, NBC and ESPN. Prime Video averaged 2.09 million for its Black Friday doubleheader of Bucks-Knicks (2.11M) and Mavericks-Lakers (2.06M), marking easily the most-watched games yet on the streamer. Viewership more-than-doubled last year’s Black Friday doubleheader on ESPN (Clippers-Timberwolves: 723K; Thunder-Lakers: 1.14M).
The Black Friday doubleheader aired following the Bears-Eagles NFL game on Prime Video, which drew 16.33 million. It was not quite a direct lead-in as Prime Video carried its full NFL postgame show in between, which averaged 4.07 million, but it was obviously a much stronger lead-in than last year’s games enjoyed.
As previously noted, the most-watched game window of last week was NBC’s “Coast to Coast Tuesday” (Magic-Sixers in most markets and Clippers-Lakers on the West Coast), which averaged 2.7 million including Adobe Analytics — the largest audience for an NBA Cup group stage game in the short history of the event. That comes with the caveat that all prior year figures are Nielsen-only, panel-only data that include less out-of-home viewing. (Nielsen-only figures were not immediately available.)
On a Nielsen-only basis, ESPN topped the week with a 1.1 rating and 2.43 million for Timberwolves-Thunder, the network’s most-watched game between Opening Week and Christmas since 2019. The network’s full day-before-Thanksgiving tripleheader averaged 2.10 million, up 54% from last year’s comparable doubleheader and the network’s largest audience on the night since the same 2019-20 season.
Bookending Timberwolves-Thunder, Rockets-Warriors drew 2.03 million and Pistons-Celtics 1.68 million. Though it was the least-watched of the three games, viewership peaked during Pistons-Celtics, reaching 3.02 million in the 7:45 PM ET quarter-hour.
All of the games were part of the NBA Cup, helping to boost the Group Stage average to 1.50 million — up 12% from last year and the highest in the three-year history of the in-season tournament.
Overall, NBA game windows were averaging 1.87 million viewers through last week, up a third from last year and the highest average at this point of a season since 2017-18. That increase rises to 60 percent when including NBA TV, which is carrying fewer games under the new media rights deal and thus impacts the average far less than in past seasons.