For sports media nerds, Sunday was an interesting day. The dominant sports program was, of course, the NFL, with the biggest game of the day on Fox at 4:25 p.m. ET. The Baltimore Ravens had to beat the Dallas Cowboys, the league’s perennial viewership jewels. That made what aired on ABC in the afternoon especially notable – a 3 p.m. kickoff of the Connecticut Sun against Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever. The game was Clark’s first postseason appearance – her league’s unicorn in viewership.
ESPN and the WNBA have never hosted a postseason opener with this much interest, so I was curious to see how the network would handle it. If you want credit for the league’s growth, as ESPN management always does, these are the games where viewers expect you to back up your claims. To ESPN’s credit, it did that for the most part on Sunday.
The network sent its best WNBA commentary team to Connecticut — Ryan Ruocco, Rebecca Lobo and Holly Rowe — to commentate on the game, and before the game began, ABC aired a 30-minute edition of “WNBA Countdown.” This pregame broadcast is of interest to viewers, including an already significant storyline of this short series: The Fever entered the postseason with 19 total playoff games played by their entire roster, while the Sun fielded players with 222 total postseason games played in their careers. “WNBA Countdown” delivered what it usually delivers more than not — smart and entertaining conversations between host Elle Duncan and analysts Andraya Carter and Chiney Ogwumike. It underscores once again that it’s time for ESPN to air a daily WNBA studio show on one of its networks during the WNBA season, and let’s hope the company finally does so in 2025.
Ruocco, Lobo and Lowe were strong as always. Lobo was quick to point out to the courtside crowd that DeWanna Bonner was Clark’s main defender. “These teams played each other four times in the regular season; DeWanna Bonner was nothing like Caitlin Clark in those first four meetings,” Lobo said. Ruocco immediately recognized what he rightly called an “outrageous decision” by the referees in the first minute when they called a phantom foul on Aliyah Boston that should have been Lexie Hull. (The referees eventually corrected their error after a foul was committed.)
— Indiana Fever (@IndianaFever) 22 September 2024
The broadcast team commentated it the way you’d expect a national broadcast to: down the middle. No hesitation in noting a clear foul by Clark on DiJonai Carrington in the third quarter. Sun guard Marina Mabrey went off the court in the second half (she had 20 points in the second half and finished the game with 27, a record for a reserve player in WNBA postseason history), and the broadcast grabbed her at the end of the third quarter, which is quality access. The fourth quarter was a slam dunk. Producer Ian Gruca and director Adam Bryant delivered a quality production, although the production group did not film this game on location (the opening rounds are produced in studios in Bristol, Connecticut, and Charlotte, North Carolina), and we hope ESPN sends the production group to the game site for future early-round games.
The kickoff time also meant the game fell into the early timeslot of NFL games, including a Fox broadcast of the Philadelphia Eagles-New Orleans Saints game that likely drew a significant audience. (It was the only ABC game of the opening round.) It’s not ideal, of course, but it is what it is. With so much postseason inventory, you can’t outrun the NFL. When the viewership numbers are released on Monday — I expect them to be high, even with Connecticut’s 93-69 win — it will be interesting to extrapolate the data to the NFL competition.
ESPN’s WNBA regular season was the most-watched season on any ESPN Networks network (including ABC), averaging 1.2 million viewers — a huge jump from last year’s games (440,000 viewers). The league had 22 regular-season games that averaged more than 1 million viewers, and if you add in the WNBA All-Star Game and WNBA Draft, that’s 24 programming events with over 1 million viewers in the 2024 calendar year (Clark was at all but three of those slots, according to Sports Media Watch). Sunday’s game will be another one.
Game 2 is on Wednesday with the same broadcast team. The game will air on ESPN and start at 7:30 p.m. ET. Here’s a sobering thought for ESPN executives and WNBA fans: It could be the last time we see Clark this season.
Ruocco pondered that possibility when I reached him after his call Sunday afternoon. “I’ll definitely think about it in the context of Caitlin’s journey, not just this entire WNBA season, but the college season before that,” he said. “We’ve had basically 12 months of meaningful, exciting basketball from Caitlin Clark. It’s going to feel almost strange to go through a period where she can’t captivate us and entertain us because she’s been such a central force not only in the sports world but culturally in our country over the last year.”
“With Caitlin, every single game, you’re aware of the importance of documenting her career,” he added. “She’s made an impact in team sports like we’ve maybe never seen before. You want to make sure that every game you make of her, you have those supporting examples. Even today when she scored her first point, I pointed out that it was her first playoff points because she’s the type of player that we might look back on 10 years from now and want to look back at.”
(Photo: Chris Marion / NBAE via Getty Images)
