The NBA ended its 2026 season with a ratings bang, bringing in the biggest regular season audience the league has seen in 24 years.
Viewership for NBA games totaled170 million viewers in the U.S. across ABC/ESPN, Prime Video, NBC/Peacock and NBA TV through the regular season, marking an 86% over last season’s viewership tally.
As for average viewership, games across ABC/ESPN, Prime Video and NBC/Peacock averaged 1.78M viewers, marking the biggest average audience in seven years and rising 16% year-over-year. When including figures from NBA TV, the league saw its highest average viewership in 13 years, up 35% from last year. Of the games, there were 57 telecasts this season that averaged at least 2 million viewers, the most since the 2011-12 regular season, while 19 telecasts averaged at least 3 million viewers.
Additionally, the NBA regular season scored more than 920 million hours watched, marking the most hours viewed since the 2011-12 season.
The season kicked off to a record-setting start with the NBA tip-off on Oct. 1, which featured the first opening night double overtime game in 20 years, boosting the league to see its biggest doubleheader audience since 2010 (excluding 2011 opening games on the Christmas holiday) with an average of 5.6 million viewers across NBC and Peacock.
Other highlights for the season include ESPN tallying both the most-watched NBA Thanksgiving Eve audience in six years with 2.1 million viewers as well as the largest average NBA Christmas audience since 2018, the regular season games on MLK Day scoring the league’s two largest afternoon audiences on MLK Day on record and the Feb. 22 Celtics-Lakers game on NBC, which ranks as the most watched regular-season Sunday night game since 2000 with an average 5.6 million viewers across ABC, Peacock and Telemundo.
This season’s NBA All-Star Game scored the biggest audience the game has seen since 2011 with an average 8.8 million viewers tuning in across NBC, Peacock and Telemundo, according to preliminary Nielsen data and digital data from Adobe Analytics. All in all, more than 46 million viewers in the U.S. watched the NBA All-Star weekend across NBC platforms and ESPN, scoring its biggest audience in 24 years.
On social media, the league generated a record 228 billion views on social media this season, up 13% year-over-year, according to Videocites.
