National Basketball Association

NBA Finals give ABC best summer ratings in decade

Published Jun. 14, 2011 8:42 p.m. ET

foxsports

The NBA's championship-winning game for the Dallas Mavericks on Sunday was seen by nearly 24 million people, leading ABC to its most-watched week during the slow summer season in nearly 10 years.

The Nielsen Co. said the Mavericks' series victory over the Miami Heat was seen by an average of 17.3 million people over the six games. That's a little less than the viewership for last year's Lakers-Celtics series, which had the advantage of going to a climactic seventh game.

The fourth, fifth and sixth games of the Heat-Mavericks series eclipsed those corresponding games last year despite the presence of the NBA's most storied franchises. Many tuned in this year to see if LeBron James would win his first championship after his much-maligned decision to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Take away basketball, and it was a good week for NBC. Two editions of that network's ''America's Got Talent'' and the singing competition ''The Voice'' did better than any other broadcast network show.

For the week, ABC led with an average of 9.2 million viewers in prime time (5.5 rating, 10 share). CBS had 6.5 million viewers (4.2, 7), NBC had 5.8 million (3.5, 6), Fox had 4.5 million (2.7, 5), ION Television had 1.1 million (0.7, 1) and the CW had 790,000 (0.5, 1).

Among the Spanish-language networks, Univision led with a prime-time average of 3.5 million people (1.8, 3), Telemundo had 940,000 (0.5, 1), TeleFutura had 620,000 (0.3, 1), Azteca had 220,000 and Estrella had 190,000 (both 0.1, 0).

NBC's ''Nightly News'' topped the evening newscasts with an average of 8.2 million viewers (5.4, 11). ABC's ''World News'' was second with 7.1 million (4.7, 10) and the ''CBS Evening News,'' on Scott Pelley's first week as anchor after Katie Couric's departure, had 5.7 million viewers (3.8, 8).

A ratings point represents 1,147,000 households, or 1 percent of the nation's estimated 114.7 million TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show.

For the week of June 6-12, the top 10 shows, their networks and viewerships: NBA Finals: Dallas vs. Miami, Game 6, ABC, 23.88 million; ''NBA Trophy Presentation,'' ABC, 21.85 million; NBA Finals: Miami vs. Dallas, Game 5, ABC, 18.32 million; NBA Finals: Miami vs. Dallas, Game 4, ABC, 16.13 million; ''America's Got Talent'' (Tuesday), NBC, 12.93 million; ''America's Got Talent'' (Wednesday), NBC, 12.64 million; ''The Voice,'' NBC, 12.31 million; ''60 Minutes,'' CBS, 9.33 million; ''NCIS,'' CBS, 9.06 million; ''NCIS: Los Angeles,'' CBS, 8.9 million.

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ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Co. CBS is owned by CBS Corp. CW is a joint venture of Warner Bros. Entertainment and CBS Corp. Fox and My Network TV are units of News Corp. NBC and Telemundo are owned by General Electric Co. ION Television is owned by ION Media Networks. TeleFutura is a division of Univision. Azteca America is a wholly owned subsidiary of TV Azteca S.A. de C.V.

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Online:

http://www.nielsen.com