The NBA is enjoying the success of the “Christmas Game” crowd.

Christmas was generous to the NBA this year! The audience was really there for it Christmas games broadcast on ABC & ESPN with an audience that practically doubled compared to last year with a total of 47.2 million viewers recorded (+45%!) for an average of 5.5 million per match (+4% compared to 2024).

The NBA can congratulate itself on this success, the figures are the best in the last fifteen yearsoff-season 2011/12, when the season started on Christmas Day due to the lockout.

Knicks – Cavs scheduled at noon in the legendary Madison Square Garden offered a breathtaking scenario and the public clearly appreciated it. For a match scheduled at this time, the league has never before recorded such a result with 6.4 million viewers, including a peak of 8 million!

The first matches won everything

The rest was also good with the Thunder-Spurs program, adding another episode to the growing rivalry between the Thunder’s Shai Giljie-Alexander and Victor Wembanyama’s Spurs, who hit hard that day with a win in Oklahoma.

Here too, the audience was there with 6.7 million viewers, including a peak of 7.4 million. It’s the second most-watched game on the schedule in eight years, when the league had the good idea to schedule a “rematch” of the 2016 Finals between the Cavs and Warriors during Christmas 2017.

The next matches, Warriors – Mavs and Lakers – Rockets, attracted 6.1 and 5.4 million viewers, respectively. And as icing on the cake, the league saved some really tough stuff for last with the Nuggets-Wolves boosted by Nikola Jokić’s performance (56 points, 16 rebounds, 15 assists and a 142-138 overtime win) that will be remembered. And in terms of audience, the match left an impression with 3.6 million viewers, making it the second most watched match in history among the last scheduled Christmas matches. The league finally congratulated itself for further increasing its numbers through social media with content reaching 1.6 billion users. This is 23% better than last year…

As a reminder, the two most watched “Christmas Games” in history are the two Lakers – Heat. The first came in 2004 when Shaquille O’Neal returned to Los Angeles to face Kobe Bryant’s Lakers, a shocker that averaged 13.18 million viewers. The second, six years later, on December 25, 2010, pitted the Californians against the Florida trio of Wade-James-Bosh for an average of 13.11 million viewers. Both times Miami won…