It was another week of competition from the pro basketball and hockey post-season tournaments for SmackDown on May 9. But perhaps because it wasn’t possible elimination games this time around, or perhaps because the episode was the final push to Backlash and featured John Cena and a returning Alexa Bliss — WWE’s Friday night numbers improved for the blue show’s latest.
Per Programming Insider, last week’s SmackDown was watched by 1,455,000 and had a .41 rating with 18-49 year olds. That’s just a little more than 3% week-to-week improvement in the overall audience, and a nearly 11% improvement in the demo number. Both are still on the low-end of SmackDown’s performance range for the year, but good enough to finish second among all cable originals.
Ahead of SmackDown — and winning the night on all television — was ESPN’s coverage of Game 3 of the NBA Playoff series between Indiana and Cleveland. That had 3.91 million viewers and did a 1.18 in the demo. Hockey was third in the ratings, with TNT’s coverage of Florida/Toronto scoring a .28 from an overall audience of 985K.
WWE could face up to three Game Sixes as competition this Friday, but it’s also possible the NBA and one of the NHL series (Boston/New York in hoops and Edmonton/Vegas on ice) could be wrapped up by then (leaving only Florida & Toronto for Friday’s slate). We’ll see how SmackDown does coming out of Backlash, then update our running tally of the past year’s worth of the show’s results:
* Moved from FOX to USA Network (broadcast to cable)
** Added a third hour
For complete results from the latest SmackDown, our live blog is here. To read a recap & review of the night’s events click here.