April 16, 2018
If you're good, they will watch.
NBC Sports Philadelphia announced Monday that Saturday night's Sixers playoff game was the highest-rated Sixers game they've aired in 15 years.
The network said their broadcast of Game 1 in the first-round series against the Miami Heat had a 6.1 HH rating, reaching about 175,000 households. Those represent the best numbers for a Sixers game on the network since May 10, 2003, when Allen Iverson led the team to a playoff victory in Game 3 of the conference semifinals against the Detroit Pistons. (The Sixers would go on to lose that series.)
The network also had 20,000 unique viewers for their Game 1 live stream.
During the regular season, in which the Sixers improved to 52 wins, NBC Sports saw a 45 percent uptick in average viewership from last season and had its highest viewership since the 2011-12 season — the last time the Sixers made the playoffs.
National networks are also enjoying high ratings for the start of the NBA playoffs. ESPN said its separate broadcast for Game 1 of Sixers/Heat was its highest-rated Saturday opener for the playoffs in five years. Combined, the first four playoff games Saturday were up 17 percent from last year's ratings on ESPN.
