Phoenix Mercury legend Diana Taurasi has enjoyed one of the most storied careers in the history of the WNBA.
The 42-year-old was drafted No. 1 overall by the Mercury in the 2024 WNBA draft. Taurasi has gone on to become the WNBA’s all-time career scoring leader, a three-time WNBA champion, a two-time WNBA Finals MVP, the 2009 WNBA MVP and an 11-time WNBA All-Star.
In her first career matchup against Taurasi and the Mercury, Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever made history. A game that was billed as The GOAT vs. The Rook wound up with the rookie delivered ratings that Taurasi’s WNBA career hadn’t ever seen before.
Clark and the Fever combined with Taurasi and the Mercury to average 1.93 million viewers on ESPN on Sunday during the Indiana’s 88-82 win over Phoenix. That figure represents the most-watched WNBA game of Taurasi’s career, surpassing the 1.43 million viewers that watched her career debut against Connecticut in May of 2004.
The 1.93 million viewers also constituted ESPN’s second-most watched WNBA game ever.
Fever-Mercury averaged 1.9 million viewers on Sunday, ESPN’s second-most watched WNBA game ever.
Through 14 games, the WNBA is up 183% from the network’s 2023 average. pic.twitter.com/YA3clT1m5k
— Front Office Sports (@FOS) July 2, 2024
Clark scored 15 points and dished out 12 assists in the win over the Mercury to register one of her five double-doubles on the season. She just missed out on a triple-double, collecting nine rebounds in the win.
The Fever-Mercury matchup on June 30 was the 10th WNBA game this season to average at least one million viewers. Prior to this 2024 WNBA season, the league had gone nearly 16 years without a single seven-figure audience per Sports Media Watch.
The 10 games with more than one million viewers is the most in a single WNBA season since the league’s final year with NBC in 2002. Their were 12 games with more than one million viewers during that 2002 WNBA season.
Nine of the 10 games that have topped one million viewers this season involved Clark and the Fever. The other that didn’t—the Los Angeles Sparks versus the Las Vegas Aces—had a direct lead-in from the Fever versus New York Liberty on May 18.
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