The WNBA Draft is officially bigger than 2 major men’s sports leagues

New York City – The cameras surrounded Paige Bueckers while heading to the WNBA draft on Monday. Bueckers, the inevitable selection No. 1 in the Draft, and one of the most important names of female basketball, and properly, ESPN projected her Instagram monitoring on the Jumbotron in Arena, which showed Shebold to be one of the most followed athletes in the most followed.

Another fifteen female university basketball stars also lit in the shed in Hudson Yards, the elegant Manhattan building where the draft was a hero. For the second consecutive year, fans could buy tickets and attend. This year, general admission tickets were twice the price, from $ 49 to $ 99.

Among the stars were Hailey Van Lith, who was a drummer to do for TCU coach Mark Campbell, his parents, and her boyfriend, the magic guard of Orlando Jalen Suggs. Kentucky Georgia Amore guard, designed by the NBA star Russell Westbrook, sat in front and the center with his family.

Then there was Kiki Iriafen, who arrived with Re -Family, all of which the traditional Nigerian attire were put.

“I wanted to look good, I wanted to feel good,” Iriafen said in his interview after the draft. “This dress was designed by Nigerian designer Nneka Alexander and just wanted to show my culture in this great scenario.”

And it was worth Iriafen to use such a special outfit, because the 2025 WNBA draft was a massive internship.

Photo by Steve Eichner/wwd through Getty Images

The two -hour program averaged 1.25 million viewers, the League announced, the second more of any draft in the history of the WNBA.

No, it did not compare with the WNBA 2024 draft, which Caitlin Clark titled the past spring. That draft saw almost twice the audience, with an average of 2.4 million viewers, largely due to the unprecedented popularity of Clark, as well as the myriad of other great names in the class, such as Angel Reese and Cameron Brink.

But 2025 should not be Compared to 2024

On the one hand, the 2024 draft left a record championship game between LSU and Iowa.

And two, because Clark has already shown that she raises audience numbers in a way that few others have capable bones.

Six WNBA networks established classification records last season, and the six games prominent by Clark. Of the 15 most seen games of the last season of the WNBA, Clark appeared in 14.

Clark’s last three university games, an elite 8 confrontation against LSU, a Four Four against UConn and a championship game against South Carolina, the three more university basketball games plus women.

Photo by Sarah Stier/Getty Images

Therefore, there are zero questions about whether female basketball receives a massive impulse of grades when Clark is involved.

The question is, what happens when it is not?

Already, 2025 has proven to be an excellent year that reaches the women’s basketball classifications: the NCAA 2025 tournament was the second most visualized women’s tournament registered.

And, despite quickly becoming an explosion, the national championship game between UConn and South Carolina had the third highest audience since ESPN began taking the tournament in 1996, by ESPN.

The WNBA draft saw more spectators than the NHL, MLB

Instead of comparing with the 2025 WNBA Draft, audience numbers related to the 2025 WNBA Draft must be compared with other Sports.

The NHL 2024 draft, for example, averaged 502,000 spectators. More than double people tuned to see Bueckers and the rest of the perspectives come in that Macklin Celebini and his class join the NHL.

The first round of the MLB draft averaged 863,000 spectators. Baseball, the United States hobby, has been overcome by female basketball, at least when it comes to the draft.

Before 2024, the WNBA draft never exceeded 601,000 spectators. That number came when Diana Taurasi finished a UConn race in 2004.

These numbers are recently a mass jump of recent years; According to Atlético, in 2020, the WNBA draft attracted 387,000 spectators. In 2021, it attracted 331000 spectators, and in 2022, attracted 403,000 spectators.

On Monday, the WNBA draft was the most visualized program throughout television among men 18-49, and all adults 18-34. It also surpassed two other important professional sports.

Five years recently as five years ago, few could have imagined that more people would tune into a female basketball draft than the MLB or NHL draft, but female basketball has traveled a long way. And, the next crop of stars, Juju Watkins of USC, Hannah Hidalgo de Notre Dame, Lauren Betts of UCLA, indicates that this growth could sustain in the coming years.