It’s not just men’s basketball proving to be a big draw at the Paris Olympics. After Kevin Durant’s return for Team USA in its opening game against reigning NBA MVP Nikola Jokic and Serbia in the men’s bracket drew massive viewership over the weekend, the U.S. women’s team did the same on Monday for its opening win over Japan.
Despite the 3 p.m. ET tip time on a Monday, A’ja Wilson and Co. reeled in an average of 3 million viewers for the 102-76 rout from Lille. The combined mark across the USA Network and Peacock streaming platform was more than any basketball game, men’s or women’s, from the 2021 Tokyo Games.
While viewership for Tokyo was hampered by its time zone, pandemic viewing habits, and the newness of Peacock, 3 million viewers is still an impressive mark for a group stage game for the women’s team.
As Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal noted, that 3 million mark would be bigger than all but four WNBA games ever.
The men’s hoops team scored nearly 11 million average viewers on Sunday during its weekend daytime slot.
Even as the arrival of Caitlin Clark has boosted the WNBA regular season so far in 2024, no game has come close to the U.S. vs. Japan on Monday. Likely, surging viewership for Paris compared with Tokyo and the hype around women’s hoops coming off a fabulous WNBA All-Star game last weekend combined to generate a big audience for the game.
Of course, Clark is not in Paris with Team USA in her rookie year. After significant chatter around her “snub” by the selection committee (including comments from member Dawn Staley over the weekend second-guessing their decision), the record viewership for the opener should put the argument to bed that Team USA needed Clark for a marketing bump.
Last week, USOPC CEO Sarah Hirshland affirmed her complete trust in USA Basketball around inviting Clark. To Hirshland’s point, the opener showed that other newcomers like Jackie Young and Kahleah Copper hardly played. The same fate likely would have befallen Clark.
As the focus moves away from Clark and Team USA reminds fans how dominant and entertaining it is without her, the audience is clearly growing as the women push for an eighth straight gold medal.
[Mollie Cahillane on X/Twitter]
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.