If you want a reason why I don’t gamble, look no further than NBA Finals Game 1 viewership. With superstars like Steph Curry and a super brand in the Celtics, I expected big numbers. After all, the NBA Playoffs leading up to the Finals posted the highest average viewership since 2018, according to numbers crunched by SBJ’s Austin Karp.
But the Game 1 audience was surprisingly low. The 11.9 million who watched via ABC and ESPN2 was the lowest Game 1 audience in 15 years, not counting last year’s Finals held in early July or the ones from a year before that were held in the Orlando bubble in October.
I expected the Finals opening game to track alongside the rest of the NBA postseason and post a comparable audience to 2019 -- especially considering that the game was close into the fourth quarter.
If this series goes six or seven games, as most have predicted, expect the audience to rebound.
