The WNBA has spent two seasons proving that a single player can move the needle for an entire league. This past weekend in Chicago, the numbers made that case louder than ever, and pundits believe Caitlin Clark to be the reason behind it.
Saturday’s All-Star Game averaged 3.2 million viewers on ABC and peaked at 3.3 million, according to ESPN. That’s a 44 percent jump from last year, when Clark sat out with an injury. It’s also the second-most-watched All-Star Game in league history, trailing only 2024, the year Clark made her debut.
The attendance told the same story. A crowd of 19,783 packed the United Center, breaking the event’s previous record of 19,487 set back in 2007. For the first time ever, the WNBA All-Star Game outdrew its NBA counterpart, which pulled in 15,973 fans at the Intuit Dome.
Team Spoon beat Team Coop 129-122, with New York’s Jonquel Jones taking home MVP honors after dropping 22 points, 13 rebounds and eight assists off the bench. Clark added 17 points of her own, including several deep threes that helped stake her team to an early lead. However, in the 2026 season, she’s only one tech away from the suspension.
None of this is happening in isolation. Commissioner Cathy Engelbert told reporters the league is already having its “most-watched WNBA season of all time” at the halfway mark, with more than 73 million unique viewers across 117 national broadcasts. Compare that to last year’s full-season total of 63 million, and the trajectory speaks for itself.
Twenty-nine games have crossed the one million viewer mark before the All-Star break alone. Last season, only 11 games hit that number across the entire year. ESPN’s Susie Piotrkowski has described Clark’s pull on new audiences in blunt terms.
“If that brought you in, I’m going to keep you here,” Piotrkowski said, calling Clark a gateway into women’s sports.
The Fever have been the engine behind nearly every ratings peak this season. The seven most-watched broadcasts through the first half all featured Indiana, including a July 12 matchup with the Las Vegas Aces that drew 2.64 million viewers on NBC, the third-best WNBA audience of any kind in the last 25 years.
The Numbers Get More Complicated Without Caitlin Clark On The Floor
Friday’s undercard events painted a different picture. The 3-Point Contest, which Clark skipped after declining her invitation, averaged 1.17 million viewers on ESPN, an 11 percent decline from last year’s 1.318 million. That dip stands out given ESPN highlighted nearly every other positive figure from the weekend in its public ratings release, yet left Friday’s numbers out until asked directly.
Still, even that smaller audience ranks as the second-largest in the event’s history, more than four times what Friday’s programming drew back in 2023. Clark’s presence in Chicago, even without her competing, appears to carry some pull of its own.
The league’s growth isn’t resting on ratings alone. A new 11-year, $2.2 billion media rights deal is now in its first year, and viewership across all partners is up 12 percent season over season. League-wide attendance has climbed 16 percent, and a historic collective bargaining agreement now shares more revenue with the players who are driving these numbers.
Clark has now appeared in six of the ten highest-rated games in WNBA history. The debate over how much credit belongs to her versus the league’s deeper star power, from A’ja Wilson to Napheesa Collier, will keep running. But as the Fever push toward the postseason, every game she plays carries the weight of a television event, and the league’s biggest numbers keep proving it.
