The MLB Wild Card round, first round of the WNBA Playoffs and start to the NHL season went head-to-head on Tuesday, and baseball came away a big winner with the best game audience to start the first round in two decades.<\/p>\n
Yankees-Red Sox Game 1 in primetime on NBC drew 7.3 million viewers, which is the best Game 1 for any Wild Card or LDS game since Tigers-Yankees drew 8.4 million in the ALDS on Fox in 2006. The audience was up 12% from ESPN\u2019s 6.5 million viewers for Game 1 of the same matchup in last year\u2019s Wild Card round. Earlier in the day in the 2pm ET window, Braves-Phillies drew 3.9 million viewers on NBC, marking the best afternoon Game 1 since the current Wild Card format started in 2020. Figures were not yet available for the Peacock-exclusive games, which were much lower than the broadcast TV counterparts.<\/p>\n
Up against MLB Wild Card games, Prime Video saw its best WNBA game audience<\/a> yet, averaging 1.42 million viewers for Aces-Fever Game 2. That\u2019s also up from 1.28 million for the Fever\u2019s Game 2 against the Dream on ESPN last year in a similar window. Later on Tuesday night, USA Network and CNBC<\/a> averaged a combined 1.06 million for Liberty-Lynx Game 2, up from 949,000 viewers for the comparable Aces-Storm Game 2 on ESPN last year.<\/p>\n The NHL opened its 2026-27 regular season with 859,000 viewers for Panthers-Hurricanes in the 5pm ET window on ESPN, up 16% from Blackhawks-Panthers in the same slot last year. In primetime, Rangers-Bruins drew 878,000 viewers on ESPN, down 19% from 1.09 million for Rangers-Penguins in the same slot in 2025. Rangers-Bruins had to deal with viewers in the markets likely watching the Yankees-Red Sox game. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The MLB Wild Card round, first round of the WNBA Playoffs and start to the NHL season went…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":819752,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[5,649,4,59443,2093,44673,10391],"class_list":["post-819751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-baseball","tag-espn","tag-mlb","tag-nbc-sports-group","tag-nhl","tag-usa-network","tag-wnba"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/117371508082116523","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=819751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/819752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=819751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=819751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=819751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}