Eagles

The NFL Trounced the NBA on Christmas Day

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Dec 28th, 2023 · 10:45 AM EST

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The results are in, and they are what we expected:

2023 NBA avg XMas viewership: 2.88 million
2023 NFL avg XMas viewership: 28.5 million

Not sure how the NFL pulls off Wednesday XMas games next year, but they’ve got reason to try

— Ethan Strauss (@SherwoodStrauss) December 28, 2023

The Chiefs-Raiders game on Christmas Day averaged 29.2 million viewers.

That’s 2x more viewers than all FIVE of the NBA’s Christmas Day games…combined.

• 5 NBA Games: 14.4 million viewers
• Chiefs-Raiders: 29.2 million viewers

Safe to say the NFL now owns Christmas Day. pic.twitter.com/zqOHyBvs9n

— Joe Pompliano (@JoePompliano) December 28, 2023

Christmas Day ratings:

🏀 Knicks-Bucks: 2.5M
🏀 Warriors-Nuggets, 4.1M
🏀 Lakers-Celtics, 5M
🏀 Heat-Sixers, 1.2M
🏀 Mavs-Suns, 1.3M

🏈 Raiders-Chiefs, 29.2M
🏈 Giants-Eagles, 29M
🏈 Ravens-49ers, 27.2M

(h/t @sportsrapport) pic.twitter.com/VYNeiZwGTP

— Front Office Sports (@FOS) December 28, 2023

This should surprise no one. The NFL is the largest and most popular league in North America. The NBA is not. We could end the post right there. But if you want to go a step further, note that Christmas isn’t even the halfway point of the NBA calendar, while this week we finished out the NFL’s Week 16. There’s so much more at stake in these high-leverage games that contribute significantly to playoff seeding. Niners/Ravens was a massive game with postseason implications. And the other two games featured last year’s Super Bowl teams. The NBA, meantime, scheduled their large markets and star players, but Joel Embiid and Jimmy Butler didn’t play. The Suns kinda stink. Two of the games got the ABC treatment, and higher ratings, but yeah, just a drop in the bucket compared to the NFL. You put regular season NBA up against late-season NFL and the latter is going to win a billion times out of a billion.