Gilbert Arenas doesn\u2019t think NBC\u2019s record viewership number for Spurs-Thunder means what NBC says it means.<\/p>\n
When NBC announced that Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals between the San Antonio Spurs and Oklahoma City Thunder averaged 9.2 million viewers<\/a> across NBC and Peacock \u2014 peaking at 12 million during double overtime \u2014 the network declared it the most-watched opening game in Western Conference Finals history.<\/p>\n Arenas, who built one of the most dominant shows in sports podcasting<\/a> from a studio in Los Angeles into a billion-view empire on Underdog, pushed back in a recent episode of Gil\u2019s Arena. The 9.2 million figure, he argued, is an average live viewership snapshot \u2014 a measure of how many people were watching at any given moment across the broadcast \u2014 not a true accounting of total audience.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat they didn\u2019t do is they didn\u2019t give you the final number of everyone who watched it, and then everyone who watched it at some point later on also,\u201d Arenas said. \u201cSo, they don\u2019t give you a 24-hour recap number, or a finishing number\u2026. NBC gives you the numbers they want to give you to make it seem like they\u2019re doing a better job.\u201d<\/p>\n Gilbert arenas says he doesn\u2019t believe the numbers that nbc put out saying the Okc vs spurs game is the highest viewed finals of all time . Gills says it\u2019s so hard to watch games with the games being on all these different apps . He thinks last years finals did more numbers pic.twitter.com\/eRbSRIIT52<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 joebuddenclips\/fanpage (@Thechat101) May 23, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Arenas also questioned what the number is actually being compared to. Last year\u2019s Western Conference Finals aired on ESPN and ABC. This year, they are on NBC and Peacock, with NBC beaming into every household in America with an antenna, and the league pulling in audiences from platforms that did not exist in the same form a year ago.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you put some on NBC and you put some on ESPN, obviously, ESPN is a premium cable package, you gotta pay for that,\u201d Arenas\u2019 co-host Josiah Johnson said. \u201cThe one I would figure on network TV is gonna do more numbers than the one on cable. Just like it\u2019s a sitcom, whatever it is, if I put\u00a0Friends on NBC, of course, it\u2019s gonna do 50, 60 million at the height of TV viewership.\u201d<\/p>\n Arenas thinks fewer people are watching now than last year because the games are simply too hard to find. The data, at least so far, suggests otherwise.<\/p>\n As Awful Announcing has laid out<\/a>, when the NBA moved its games off cable and onto free broadcast television, audiences showed up in numbers the league had not seen since the 1990s, with first-round viewership climbing 22% and NBC\u2019s 15-game broadcast slate averaging 5.5 million viewers per game, including a Sixers-Celtics Game 7 that drew nearly<\/a> 11 million people, the largest first-round audience since 1999. Nielsen methodology changes and the absorption of regional sports network audiences into national totals contributed to those gains, but the scale of the growth far outpaced what any accounting adjustment could explain.<\/p>\n The numbers NBC is promoting are the numbers NBC wants you to see. They are also, by every credible measure, real.<\/p>\n \t\n