If you didn’t catch Saturday night’s Warriors-Sixers game on ABC, you missed out on a rare dunk by Steph Curry, who would later go on to say that the stuff shot would be the last of his career.
Curry threw down his one-hander with 7:15 to go in the fourth quarter, bringing his all-time regular-season total to 27. But as the four-time NBA champ told reporters after the game, there won’t be a 28th slam.
“That will probably be my last dunk, though,” Curry said during a postgame scrum at the Wells Fargo Center. “I’m calling it right now: That was the last one you’re going to see.”
Curry’s dunk marked the first time he broke out the above-the-rim stuff in six years. And while he’s unlikely to be taking to the skies again (“It took everything out of me to get up there”), there’s always the 3-pointer. Since his debut with Golden State in 2009, Curry has sunk an NBA record 3,974 treys; runner-up James Harden is in another area code with 3,102.
While Curry remains one of the league’s top draws, with the Warriors appearing in five of the season’s 20 most-watched telecasts, the NBA’s TV deliveries in 2024-25 suggest that the class of the Eastern Conference are holding their own against the usual suspects in California. Enhanced by the surprise addition of Luka Dončić exactly one month ago, LeBron James and the Lakers are doing their usual job of overheating the Nielsen dials, accounting for seven of the season’s largest TV audiences … although they have some competition in Boston.
Since tipping things off on Oct. 22 with a decisive 132-109 win over the Knicks, the Celtics have laid claim to seven of the NBA’s 20 biggest deliveries. The New York-Boston opener averaged 3.01 million viewers on TNT, trailing only ABC’s Jan. 25 Lakers-Warriors showdown (3.05 million) as the season’s most-watched non-Christmas Day telecast.
The Knicks are tied with the Warriors and the Mavericks with five top-20 appearances to date.
Factor in the Yuletide games, and ABC/ESPN’s Lakers-Warriors holiday nail-biter beats all comers with an average draw of 7.84 million viewers. Next in line is the Sixers-Celtics lead-in (5.16 million), followed by Spurs-Knicks in the Knickerbockers’ customary noon E.T. slot (4.91 million). All told, the five-game Xmas slate averaged 5.34 million viewers, making it the NBA’s most-watching holiday offering since 2019, this despite a little friendly competition from the NFL and Beyoncé. (The Netflix doubleheader averaged 24.2 million viewers.)
Including the five Christmas games that were simulcast by cable sibling ESPN, big-reach ABC thus far has played a part in 13 of the NBA’s 20 biggest draws in 2024-25. TNT has notched five of the league’s top draws, while a pair of games exclusive to ESPN have made the cut. Most recently, ESPN averaged 2.01 million viewers care of its Feb. 10 Jazz-Lakers telecast, which marked Dončić’s debut in the purple-and-gold threads. (The national turnout was undermined somewhat by the fact that L.A.’s 132-113 rout was televised in the home market by Spectrum SportsNet.)
While the NBA remains in thrall to LeBron and Curry—it’s no coincidence that the four highest-rated Finals of the last decade featured the two stars going head-to-head—the numbers the Celtics and Knicks have been putting up from the friendly confines of their respective markets suggest that there may be life Back East. Repping the nation’s largest DMA (New York is home to 7.49 million TV residences, or 6% of the overall base), the Knicks are shooting for their first championship berth since 1999.
Boston, meanwhile, is the country’s ninth-largest market, with 2.58 million TV homes. A drawn-out Eastern Conference Finals series featuring the two rivals undoubtedly would be quite the sendoff for TNT, which will air its last NBA game in late May.
Speaking of TNT, in a recent stint as a guest on the network’s telecast of the NBA All-Star Game, Draymond Green predicted that the Jimmy Butler-enhanced Warriors will win another title this year. There may be something to that. Since Butler shipped out of Miami, Curry has played like a man possessed, averaging 31 points per game and connecting on 44% of his three-pointers.
Any combination of Lakers/Warriors in the West and Celtics/Knicks in the East come June would be like Christmas all over again for ABC. And a Finals that goes six games or better, no matter the combination of the four, should put an end to a lot of the chatter about the NBA’s place in the culture.
Just don’t expect Steph Curry to dunk his way to another championship berth.
