Heat-Celtics scores for TNT, a Stanley Cup question mark, Monaco F1 sets a record: Sports on TV

In the exciting world of live sports television viewership analysis, it’s a truism that a clinching Game 7 broadcast will generate the best audience numbers.

That again proved true with the Jimmy Butler-led Miami Heat’s 103-84 victory at Boston on Monday night, which averaged a series-best 11.9 million viewers for TNT. Obviously, the narrative set things up: Eighth-seeded Miami shockingly went up 3-0 on the Celtics but then allowed them to tie the series before handling a fading Boston team on Monday night.

The Game 7 broadcast peaked at 14.2 million viewers, and it ended up as TNT’s third most-watched NBA game ever, the network said. It also was the fifth-best NBA game audience on cable, per Sports Media Watch, and seventh-largest non-finals viewership for the league on broadcast or cable since the current media deals began in 2002-03 (the biggest being 16 million on TNT for the Warriors’ Game 7 win over the Thunder in the 2016 Western Conference finals).

In other superlatives, it was also TNT’s most-watched Eastern Conference finals telecast, topping the 11.6 million for Heat-Pacers in 2013 (which did not include out-of-home viewership that Nielsen began tracking only in summer 2020).

Game 6 was pretty good, too: It averaged 8.7 million viewers on Saturday night to become the network’s most-watched Game 6 in 11 years, TNT said. The entire series averaged 7.4 million viewers, up 6 percent over 2022’s Heat-Celtics conference finals matchup, TNT said. It was the best ECF audience in a decade, and the network’s entire NBA playoff coverage averaged 4.7 million viewers per game, up 14 percent year over year and its best average best since 2018.

While Monday’s Game 7 wasn’t a thriller in terms of the final score, it perhaps sets up an NBA Finals viewership that won’t be as dire as some scuttlebutt suggests. Denver and two-time MVP Nikola Jokić are in their first finals, and Miami has its underdog storyline — and storylines help drive viewership, if properly conveyed by the network (ABC in this case) and the NBA.

We’ll know starting Thursday, when Game 1 tips off at 8:30 p.m., if the sporting public will tune in as they have, or have not, in the past. I outlined elsewhere the differences between Miami and Denver as teams and markets, so it’ll be curious to see if viewership is any sort of outlier.

ABC and the NBA will both be praying to the gods of capitalism atop Mount Nielsen that the finals goes seven games. The last NBA Finals to go the full seven was 2016 when 31 million watched Cleveland beat Golden State in the clincher, after being down 3-1, for the Cavs’ first title and the city’s first since 1964. In NBA history, there have been 19 Game 7s in the finals, but only 10 since 1970 and just four this century.

Last year’s six-game finals averaged 12.4 million viewers for Golden State’s latest championship, which was better than the 2020 and 2021 finals that were affected by the pandemic conditions. The finals from 2013-19 averaged 18 million viewers.

Whichever team wins the Larry O’Brien trophy will be the fifth different franchise to be crowned NBA champions since 2019, which is some parity as the golden age of Golden State appears to wind down. (The last time there were five different NBA champions in five years: 1977-81.) Is that good for the star-driven NBA as it has been for the more team-driven NFL? Hard to say amid the chaos of cord-cutting and overall prime-time television usage declining among the nearly 124 million U.S. TV households.

ABC will broadcast all finals games, as it has for 21 seasons. Here’s the schedule:

• Game 1: Heat at Nuggets (8:30 p.m. Thursday)
• Game 2: Heat at Nuggets (8 p.m. Sunday)
• Game 3: Nuggets at Heat (8:30 p.m. June 7)
• Game 4: Nuggets at Heat (8:30 p.m. June 9)
• Game 5: Heat at Nuggets (8:30 p.m. June 12)*
• Game 6: Nuggets at Heat (8:30 p.m. June 15)*
• Game 7: Heat at Nuggets (8 p.m. June 18)*

(* if necessary)

Live coverage also is on Spanish-language ESPN Deportes, ESPN Radio, and the ESPN app. Also, Game 1 will stream live on ESPN+.

ABC said it plans to use a 3-point shot distance tracker and 55 total cameras for the finals telecasts, including 15 slow-motion cameras, a skycam and 4K camera, live drone coverage and other technical wizardry.

ABC’s final broadcast crew will be led as usual by Mike Breen, Jeff Van Gundy and Mark Jackson for the 15th time, along with Lisa Salters reporting courtside. Shoulder programming will include a 30-minute pregame “NBA Countdown” ahead of scheduled tipoffs.

Game 1 also will have a “Stephen A’s World” alternate presentation on ESPN2 and ESPN+.

NHL: While not directly related to TV viewership, one of the more interesting things about the Stanley Cup finals-bound Florida Panthers is their affordability. For years, they’ve had the NHL’s cheapest average ticket prices and the lowest Fan Cost Index average, making them a great value for families to attend. But does that cross over into viewership? And does it mean anything on a national level?

Probably not as much as Florida, the Eastern Conference’s second wild card, knocking off Boston, Toronto, and Carolina to get to the finals to meet a Vegas team vying for its second shot at the cup in just its fifth season of existence.

That’s probably not enough to lift this series out of pedestrian viewership levels. And it’s a Stanley Cup Final featuring southern U.S. teams — no Canadian teams, no Original Six clubs. It’s also a series devoid of household-name star power, which is critical to attracting casual fans — which is a wider NHL problem beyond just a finals issue.

Will Florida’s Matthew Tkachuk earn a wider public profile? The league’s more widely known veteran players like Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin are in their middle and later 30s, and the nostalgia value of legends such as Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux has its limits. Potential superstars with crossover appeal such as Connor McDavid and Jack Hughes are waiting in the wings.

This is the first time the Stanley Cup Final will air entirely on cable, with TNT providing the main broadcast that’ll be simulcast on TBS and/or truTV. A year ago, the games all aired on ABC as part of the NHL’s new set of media rights deals. NBC previously carried the games on its broadcast network and NBCSN. Since broadcast networks tend to enjoy bigger audiences than cable, it’s hard to predict what this year’s final series might average.

It surely will be better than the COVID-19 era championships, right?

Oddly, the 2020 Stanley Cup Final, which was played in September of the pandemic year that saw widespread ratings dips, did not have the worst viewership average in NHL history. That ignominious honor belongs to the 2007 series won by the Anaheim Ducks over the Ottawa Senators in five games — with three of them on NBC-owned cable channel Versus that had poorer market penetration than other channels (it became NBC Sports Network in 2014 and was shut down in 2021).

Cup viewership improved in 2021 before getting back to a more normal range last season.

Turner will carry the Stanley Cup Final next in 2025 and 2027 while ABC will air them again in 2024, 2026 and 2028. The networks are paying the NHL a combined $4.87 billion through 2027-28 for the rights to national regular-season and playoff games. The league’s 12-year, $4.9 billion Canadian TV rights contract with Rogers Communications ends in 2026.

Here’s this year’s Stanley Cup Final broadcast schedule:

• Game 1: Panthers at Golden Knights (8 p.m. Saturday, TNT, TBS, truTV)
• Game 2: Panthers at Golden Knights (8 p.m. Monday, TNT, TBS, truTV)
• Game 3: Golden Knights at Panthers (8 p.m. June 8, TNT, TBS, truTV)
• Game 4: Golden Knights at Panthers (8 p.m. June 10, TNT, TBS, truTV)
• Game 5: Panthers at Golden Knights (8 p.m. June 13, TNT, truTV)*
• Game 6: Golden Knights at Panthers (8 p.m. June 16, TNT, TBS, truTV)*
• Game 7: Panthers at Golden Knights (8 p.m. June 19, TNT, TBS, truTV)*

(* if necessary)

Note: All the games also air on Canadian television on CBC, TVA Sports, and Sportsnet)

None of the games are up against the NBA Finals broadcasts.

AUTO RACING: If you’re into car races, Sunday was your Super Bowl. Well, it was supposed to be, with weather forcing one race into Monday afternoon — never good for TV ratings.

The day kicked off with Formula One’s venerable Monaco Grand Prix at 8 a.m. on ABC followed by the 107th Indianapolis 500 at 12:45 p.m. on NBC, and then the 64th running of NASCAR’s Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway at 6 p.m. on Fox. The NASCAR race got bumped to Monday due to rain.

The early race, lashed by rain hitting the French Riviera, was won — no surprise here — by Red Bull’s Max Verstappen. The broadcast averaged 1.79 million viewers for ABC during the race itself — the best average for Monaco on live U.S. television and third-best for American F1 race viewership overall, per ESPN. Last year’s rain-delayed Monaco Grand Prix averaged 1.6 million viewers on ESPN, which was its best U.S. cable TV audience. In 2021, on ESPN2, it averaged 977,000 viewers, but F1 has continues to grow its American viewership in recent years.

The big domestic race on Sunday, obviously, was Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden winning his first Indianapolis 500 by passing 2022 winner Marcus Ericsson on the final lap in a race that was memorable for several crashes, including Kyle Kirkwood scarily flipping after hitting the wall and losing a tire into the grandstands — thankfully, with no injuries to fans or the driver.

NBC’s broadcast averaged 4.72 million viewers, which was a slight improvement over 2022’s 4.62 million average for Ericsson’s victory. But the year-over-year rating declined, from a 2.7 rating in 2022 to a 2.65 rating in 2023.

A rating is a percentage expression of the number of U.S. TVs turned into a particular program, meaning in this case 2.65 percent of television households watched the race on Sunday.

The iconic race’s peak viewership was 9.74 million with a 6.5 rating on ABC in 2005 (the year Danica Patrick made her Indy 500 debut), per Sports Media Watch data. It moved to NBC in 2019.

The race averaged 5.73 million viewers from 2013-19 on ABC.

Because of the Monday holiday, Nielsen viewership data isn’t yet available for the Coca-Cola 600, which was originally scheduled for 6 p.m. Sunday but was forced into a 3 p.m. Monday start on Fox. Ryan Blaney, also a Team Penske driver, won on Monday to break a 59-race winless drought.

A year ago, the race averaged 3.87 million viewers for Denny Hamlin’s victory, its smallest audience yet on Fox, where it’s been run since 2001. That race aired against the Celtics winning Game 7 of the NBA’s Eastern Conference finals on ESPN.

All viewership data is from Nielsen and Adobe Analytics, and other metrics via the TV networks, Nielsen, Sports Media Watch, ShowBuzz Daily, 506Sports.com and the leagues, unless otherwise noted. All times U.S. Eastern.

(Photo of the Heat’s Jimmy Butler: Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)