The WNBA's opening weekend delivered impressive viewership figures, highlighted by the highly anticipated matchup between Indiana's Caitlin Clark and Dallas' Paige Bueckers. This game, which resulted in a 107-104 victory for the Wings, averaged 2.49 million viewers on ABC. This significant audience made it the league's second-most watched regular-season game ever broadcast on ABC or ESPN. Beyond the WNBA, the game also stood out as the 14th most-viewed sports event of the past week, according to Nielsen's Big Data + Panel, with only 12 NBA playoff games surpassing it in viewership.

The particular contest held considerable appeal due to the star power on display. It uniquely featured the last four No. 1 picks in the WNBA draft: Aliyah Boston and Caitlin Clark from the Indiana Fever, and Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd representing the Dallas Wings. For Clark, this game marked her first regular-season appearance since July of the previous year, further adding to the anticipation and drawing a large audience.

While the Clark-Bueckers game achieved remarkable numbers, it did not quite reach the peak viewership recorded for another Caitlin Clark-featured game. The season opener last year, which pitted Clark's Fever against Angel Reese's Chicago Sky, garnered an even higher 2.7 million viewers. Notably, the top three most-viewed WNBA games ever aired on ESPN or ABC have all prominently featured Caitlin Clark, underscoring her substantial impact on the league's popularity. Another significant game, a 2024 playoff match between the Fever and the Connecticut Sun, also attracted a large audience, averaging 2.54 million viewers.

The strong viewership extended across the entire opening weekend doubleheader. Following the Indiana-Dallas game, the second game of the doubleheader, a rematch of last season's final between Las Vegas and Phoenix, attracted 1.15 million viewers. Cumulatively, the doubleheader averaged 1.9 million viewers, solidifying its place as the second-most-watched opening weekend in the history of ABC and ESPN's WNBA coverage.

ESPN has been a long-standing broadcast partner for the WNBA, having aired games since the league's inception in 1997. The current season marks a new milestone for accessibility, with a record 216 WNBA regular-season games and events scheduled to be available across various broadcast platforms. These platforms include ABC/ESPN, CBS, Amazon Prime Video, ION, NBC, USA Sports, and NBA TV, reflecting the league's growing reach and strategic efforts to make its content widely available to fans.