NBA
TV ratings: How many people watched the Celtics-Mavericks 2024 NBA Finals?
The one sidedness of the 2023-24 NBA Finals eventually impacted on the audience as the Celtics sealed Game 5 for a 4-1 win over Dallas.
In the end, it simply wasn’t to be for Dallas as the Boston Celtics ran out comfortable Game 5 winners in front of a packed TD Garden to secure a record breaking 18th NBA Championship and now rightfully claim that they are the greatest franchise in NBA history.
Dallas were always facing an uphill task in the series trailing 3-0 and despite a brief rally in Game 4 in Texas, the Finals always had an air of inevitability with Joe Mazzulla’s team simply too strong for the rest of the competition with Jaylen Brown voted MVP of the finals with the shooting guard hitting 21 points to complement the 31 of Jayson Tatum in Game 5.
“This means the world,” Tatum said on stage after the team received the trophy from NBA Commissioner Adam Silver. “It’s been a long time. And damn I’m grateful.”
How the Finals stacked up in audience
Things started positively from an audience perspective with Game 1 delivering the biggest audience share ever on ABC with 20.3%, quadrupling the viewership of the closest competition on television.
The opener averaged 11 million viewers, peaking with more than 12 million viewers from 9:15-9:30 p.m. ET.
Things got better for Game 2 with the TD Garden contest averaging 12,063,000 viewers, peaking with 14,106,000 viewers at 10 ET which was up 10% from Game 1 and making it the most watched Game 2 in the Finals for five years.
Interest was still high heading into the third game with the average audience for Game 3 on ABC and ESPN seeing a 2% increment from last year’s Game 3, according to Nielsen. The Celtics however beat the Mavericks in Texas to take a commanding 3-0 lead which averaged 11,426,000 viewers, peaking with 13,926,000 viewers at 10:45 p.m. ET.
Interest dips at Game 4
It was with Game 4 with the series as good as done and dusted where general interest waned as ABC posted an audience of just 9.62 million viewers for Game 4. Excluding the pandemic NBA Finals in 2020, which aired in October, this figure makes the Texas contest the least-watched NBA Finals Game 4 on record.
The 2024 NBA Finals eventually closed out with 12.2 million viewers, bringing the 5-game average to 11.3M which was down 3% vs last year’s Miami Heat-Denver Nuggets series.
Despite posting solid numbers initially, the dominance of Boston seemed to dent general public interest as the series advanced.