CNN
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The Caitlin Clark period within the WNBA kicked off in an enormous manner Tuesday night time.
The season opener between the Indiana Fever and Connecticut Solar drew a mean of two.1 million viewers on ESPN2, ESPN+ and Disney+, making it essentially the most watched WNBA sport in additional than twenty years. The matchup additionally marked the primary time Disney+ has streamed a stay sports activities sport, peaking with a mean of two.3 million viewers, ESPN mentioned.
The sport, which noticed the Solar outshine the Fever in a 92-71 victory, drew the biggest WNBA viewers for the reason that Los Angeles Sparks and Houston Comets confronted off in 2001, based on Sports Illustrated.
Clark’s debut outdrew the competing NHL males’s Stanley Cup playoff sport between the Boston Bruins and Florida Panthers that aired throughout the identical interval Tuesday night on the flagship ESPN. The NHL sport drew a mean of two million viewers and peaked with 3.2 million viewers, the community mentioned.
Clark has been breaking data since her meteoric rise within the NCAA.
Final month, the NCAA ladies’s basketball Nationwide Championship matchup between Clark’s Iowa Hawkeyes and the South Carolina Gamecocks drew 18.9 million viewers, smashing tv rankings data.
The sport was not solely essentially the most watched ladies’s faculty basketball sport in historical past, nevertheless it additionally surpassed the viewership of any basketball sport, together with each males’s {and professional}, since 2019, based on Nielsen.
The Clark phenomenon continued weeks later, when the WNBA draft, wherein she was a No. 1 general choose, drew a mean of two.4 million viewers, shattering viewership data and much surpassing the earlier all-time excessive of 601,000 viewers in 2004.
Clark and the Fever are set to face off towards the New York Liberty on Thursday in Indianapolis.