The 2024 Finals will not have been the most exciting in history, that’s for sure. Three out of five matches were largely won, and only Game 2 and especially Game 3 offered a little thrill. This is not much for the last series of the season and the public therefore did not really follow it.
Game 5, the coronation, attracted 12.2 million viewers on ABC. This is less than Game 5 last season, between Denver and Miami, which had an audience of 13.08 million people.
So much so that, on average, 11.3 million people watched the Finals matches this year. Here again it is less than last year (11.6) and it is especially the worst audience (classic) since the 2007 Finals which opposed the Spurs and the Cavaliers! 17 years ago, Tony Parker's coronation, with a sweep against LeBron James, only interested an average of 9.2 million viewers.
No more peak at 14 million since Covid
It should be noted that the 2020 and 2021 Finals did worse than the 2024 edition, but they took place during the Covid period, therefore not in June, as usual. The first (7.6 million) were played in the “bubble” in October 2020, the second (10.1 million) in July 2021.
The Boston – Dallas duel did not do better in a match than 12.3 million, for Game 2. And this is only the second time, with 2020 and since 2007, that no match exceeds 12.5 million people in front of their screen.
Moreover, we can note that no Finals meeting has reached the 14 million mark for five years (so before Covid) and the series between the Raptors and the Warriors in 2019, which had exceeded 18 million viewers during the last two matches of the series.
