The NBA returned to NBC in a big way Tuesday night.

Tuesday’s NBA Opening Night doubleheader on NBC and Peacock averaged a combined 5.61 million viewers per Nielsen and Adobe Analytics, marking the largest audience for the traditional season-opening slate since 2010, when LeBron James made his debut as a member of the Miami Heat. (The 2011 season began on Christmas due to an owner-imposed lockout, with the five-game schedule averaging 6.3 million.)

With a streaming audience of 1.0 million viewers as measured by Adobe Analytics, the Nielsen-only figure would clock in around 4.6 million.

Keep in mind that Nielsen has changed its methodology in the past year to include expanded out-of-home viewing and add “Big Data” from set-top boxes and smart TVs to its traditional panel. In addition, NBC is the only one of the major networks to regularly issue a combined viewership figure across Nielsen and Adobe Analytics.

Those caveats do not fully explain the massive 90% increase in viewership over last year, when Opening Night averaged 2.95 million on TNT — a Nielsen-only figure that includes less out of home viewing and zero “Big Data” — but they could make the difference in comparisons to a year like 2017, when the games averaged a Nielsen-only, panel-only, in-home-only audience of 4.9 million.

The double-overtime Rockets-Thunder game was the most-watched of the doubleheader, averaging 5.85 million. Warriors-Lakers followed with 5.11 million during the period it aired on NBC. (Warriors-Lakers began exclusively on Peacock due to the length of Rockets-Thunder.) Viewership peaked at 7.1 million in overtime of the early game, the 10:45 PM ET quarter-hour.

This year’s Opening Night marked the return of the NBA to NBC for the first time since the 2002 NBA Finals. Excluding the Christmas Day start in 2011, the games were the first NBA season openers on broadcast television since the days of CBS in the early 1980s, and those games did not air live in the entire country.

Outside of Christmas, the most-watched game of last year’s NBA regular season was Lakers-Celtics on ABC this past March, which averaged a Nielsen panel-only audience of 4.6 million. The last non-Christmas regular season game to top the five million mark was Celtics-Cavaliers on the aforementioned 2017 Opening Night (5.6M).