REPORT: WNBA Playoff TV Ratings Revealed Without Caitlin Clark, And It’s Not Good.

No Caitlin Clark, no viewership.

The WNBA is feeling the effects of not having their dynamic rookie in any more postseason games after the Indiana Fever was eliminated in the first round by the Connecticut Sun.

Sunday’s Game 1 of the WNBA semifinals between the defending champion Las Vegas Aces and the top-seeded New York Liberty had 929,000 viewers on ABC.

That figure was the League’s most-watched semifinal game in 22 years.

Great news, right? Wrong.

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That figure is only half the 1.8 million viewers Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever drew in their playoff opener against the Connecticut Sun.

ESPN has previously announced that the first-round playoff game 2 between the Fever and Connecticut Sun posted a Nielsen number of 2.5 million viewers and peaked at 3.4 million viewers.

That number made it the highest-rated WNBA game on cable in the League’s history. It was up 507 percent from last year’s first-round coverage on ESPN.

The WNBA having great ratings with Clark should come as no surprise since her Iowa Hawkeyes set ratings records when she was in college.

The Indiana Fever games during the 2024 season averaged 1.18 million viewers.

With the increase in fans this year, more players are starting to become known, so the ratings should start evening out a bit over the next few years, and the dropoff won’t be as bad as it is right now.