The Oklahoma City Thunder sealed its first title win ever Sunday night in the most-watched NBA Finals game in six years, invigorating an otherwise lackluster year for the series.
Per early data from Nielsen, about 16.4M people tuned in for Game 7 of the series between the Thunder and the Indiana Pacers. The telecast peaked with 19.3M viewers around 9:45 p.m. ET. These numbers may go up slightly when Nielsen reports its final data on Tuesday, and this post will be updated.
That’s the biggest average audience for an NBA Finals game since 2019, when the last two games in the series averaged around 18M.
Ultimately, this helped boost the full 2025 NBA postseason (which is 35 games) to an average of 6.12M viewers per game, which is up 10% from last year.
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However, prior to Game 7, the picture looked a bit different. None of the first six games scored above 10M viewers, which is quite low for the NBA Finals. But, the seven-game series’ audience average is 10.27M, and they make up the seven most-watched broadcasts on TV since early May.
It’s also worth noting that this is the lowest audience for a Game 7 on record. There hasn’t been one since 2016, and the previous record low was 19M in 2005.