Gilbert Arenas doesn’t think NBC’s record viewership number for Spurs-Thunder means what NBC says it means.
When NBC announced that Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals between the San Antonio Spurs and Oklahoma City Thunder averaged 9.2 million viewers across NBC and Peacock — peaking at 12 million during double overtime — the network declared it the most-watched opening game in Western Conference Finals history.
Arenas, who built one of the most dominant shows in sports podcasting from a studio in Los Angeles into a billion-view empire on Underdog, pushed back in a recent episode of Gil’s Arena. The 9.2 million figure, he argued, is an average live viewership snapshot — a measure of how many people were watching at any given moment across the broadcast — not a true accounting of total audience.
“What they didn’t do is they didn’t give you the final number of everyone who watched it, and then everyone who watched it at some point later on also,” Arenas said. “So, they don’t give you a 24-hour recap number, or a finishing number…. NBC gives you the numbers they want to give you to make it seem like they’re doing a better job.”
Arenas also questioned what the number is actually being compared to. Last year’s Western Conference Finals aired on ESPN and ABC. This year, they are on NBC and Peacock, with NBC beaming into every household in America with an antenna, and the league pulling in audiences from platforms that did not exist in the same form a year ago.
“If you put some on NBC and you put some on ESPN, obviously, ESPN is a premium cable package, you gotta pay for that,” Arenas’ co-host Josiah Johnson said. “The one I would figure on network TV is gonna do more numbers than the one on cable. Just like it’s a sitcom, whatever it is, if I put Friends on NBC, of course, it’s gonna do 50, 60 million at the height of TV viewership.”
Arenas thinks fewer people are watching now than last year because the games are simply too hard to find. The data, at least so far, suggests otherwise.
As Awful Announcing has laid out, when the NBA moved its games off cable and onto free broadcast television, audiences showed up in numbers the league had not seen since the 1990s, with first-round viewership climbing 22% and NBC’s 15-game broadcast slate averaging 5.5 million viewers per game, including a Sixers-Celtics Game 7 that drew nearly 11 million people, the largest first-round audience since 1999. Nielsen methodology changes and the absorption of regional sports network audiences into national totals contributed to those gains, but the scale of the growth far outpaced what any accounting adjustment could explain.
The numbers NBC is promoting are the numbers NBC wants you to see. They are also, by every credible measure, real.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.