By Brian Stelter, CNN
(CNN) — The New York Knicks’ first championship-clinching win since the 1970s set a ratings record dating back to the 1990s.
Saturday night’s Game 5 telecast averaged 24.5 million viewers, making it the most-watched NBA Finals Game 5 since 1998, according to Nielsen ratings figures that were released Tuesday afternoon.
Of course, the media environment was profoundly different back in the ’90s, with far fewer channels and platforms competing for attention. And that 1998 series featured Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls winning their sixth championship in eight years.
NBA Finals ratings have sagged in recent years, just like the ratings for many other major events, and last year’s Game 5 between the Indiana Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder averaged 9.5 million viewers.
But this year’s showdown between the Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs electrified sports fans all across the country, thanks in part to New York’s multiple, highly dramatic comeback victories.
Overall, according to ESPN, the NBA Finals (shown on both ESPN and its broadcast sister ABC) “averaged 20.6 million viewers across five games,” fully doubling last year’s seven-game finals.
On Saturday night, the Game 5 audience peaked in the final minutes of the fourth quarter, with about 33 million watching as the Knicks completed one last comeback to clinch their first title since 1973.
The Nielsen numbers are a snapshot of huge interest in the Knicks’ championship quest. But no metric can fully capture what the Knicks win felt like in New York or how widely it reverberated.
Nielsen, for instance, has a system for measuring out-of-home viewing, but the huge viewing parties in the streets of New York aren’t realistically counted in the company’s total.
Writing for Front Office Sports, Michael McCarthy said the Knicks’ victory also represents a resurgence for the NBA as a whole.
“For years, many of the prevailing media narratives about the $14.3 billion league have been negative,” he observed.
Among those critiques: “The NBA can’t draw TV ratings compared to the mighty NFL. The league is too ‘woke’ politically. ESPN, NBC Sports, and Amazon Prime Video foolishly overpaid for league media rights with their $76 billion, 11-year agreements.”
But the Knicks versus the Spurs, he wrote, made the NBA look “like a juggernaut again.”
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