In the fast-paced world of sports media, headlines are everything. And this past week, the WNBA and its media partners celebrated a massive one: the 2025 WNBA Finals were the “most-watched in 25 years.” On the surface, it’s a stunning victory for the league, a definitive sign that its popularity is exploding organically, with or without its rookie phenom, Caitlin Clark.

But beneath the surface of that flashy, triumphant headline lies a more complicated—and according to analysts, a far more deceptive—story.

A deep dive into the numbers reveals a consistent, calculated pattern of “cherry-picked” data and “buried” details, all seemingly designed to achieve one goal: to manufacture a narrative of league-wide growth while deliberately downplaying its staggering dependence on a single player. The truth about the 2025 Finals ratings isn’t a story of success; it’s a masterclass in statistical spin.

This narrative-crafting didn’t just begin with the Finals. It’s been a meticulous, season-long strategy. The pattern became clear following the 2024 NCAA tournament, a historic event that saw Caitlin Clark’s final game with Iowa draw an insane 18.9 million viewers. That number set an impossible benchmark.

So, when the 2025 March Madness tournament rolled around, media partners quietly began comparing viewership not to the “actual previous year” of 2024, but to 2023. Why? Because comparing 2025 to 2024 would have forced them to admit a catastrophic “collapse” of over 10 million viewers. By selectively using 2023 as the baseline, they could spin a story of “growth” where none existed.

This cherry-picking became a habit. When the 2025 WNBA draft ratings were announced, headlines bragged of a “119% increase”—again, compared to 2023. They deliberately skipped 2024, the year Caitlin Clark was drafted, which would have revealed a devastating 49% drop. The audience hadn’t grown; it had been cut in half.

The same tactic was deployed for the 2025 All-Star Game. The media trumpeted a “158% increase” over 2023, conveniently ignoring the 2024 All-Star Game. A true year-over-year comparison would have shown a 36% decline, a loss of more than 1.2 million viewers. The pattern is undeniable: when Caitlin Clark is the baseline, the league’s “growth” vanishes.

This brings us to the 2025 WNBA Finals. Without Clark and the Indiana Fever, the league faced a potential public relations disaster. The on-the-ground demand was simply not there. For Game 1 of the Finals, tickets were reportedly available for as little as $35, with courtside seats going for just a few hundred dollars. By contrast, when Clark and the Fever played in New York earlier in the season, the cheapest seats were $112, with courtside running into the thousands.

The demand wasn’t there. The hype wasn’t there. And yet, when the numbers for Game 1 came in, the media declared a miracle: 1.9 million viewers, a massive jump from the 1.1 million who tuned into Game 1 in 2024. But how?

The answer is the “smoking gun” of the entire story, a detail the league and its partners are desperate to keep in the fine print.

On September 2, 2025, right before the playoffs began, Nielsen—the company that measures television ratings—completely overhauled its methodology. This wasn’t a minor tweak. The old system, which the 2024 Finals were measured on, pulled data from a “panel” of roughly 42,000 households. The new system, which the 2025 Finals were measured on, pulls data from more than 75 million devices, incorporating “big data” and, crucially, “out-of-home viewing” (bars, restaurants, etc.) for the first time.

This change makes any year-over-year comparison “meaningless.” You are not comparing apples to apples; you are comparing two “completely different systems.” The 2025 numbers are “year one of a brand new measurement era,” and even Nielsen admitted this new system would “naturally” make ratings look higher.

The 1.9 million viewer number wasn’t a sign of audience growth; it was the result of a technological “bump” from a new, far wider tracking net.

But here is where the narrative truly collapses. Even with this new, artificially inflated system, the league “couldn’t hold the audience.”

After the much-hyped 1.9 million for Game 1, viewership “dropped hard” for Games 2 and 3, plummeting to around 1.2 million viewers. This is where the deception becomes undeniable. That 1.2 million viewer number, measured on the new, inflated system, is still fewer viewers than 2024’s Game 2, which pulled 1.34 million viewers on the old, smaller system.

If this year’s Finals were measured on the same standard as last year, the audience would have “possibly dipped below a million viewers.” The real audience, stripped of the statistical spin, was likely much smaller.

As expected, the media did its job. Outlets like Front Office Sports ran the “Most Watched in 25 Years” headline. The real story—the crucial detail about the new Nielsen methodology—was “buried” in the fifth paragraph, a single sentence that most readers would never see. The goal was simple: “They want you to read the headline, nod, and move on.”

Why go to such lengths? Because the WNBA is in the middle of a massive business boom. Team valuations have reportedly “more than doubled” since Clark’s arrival. The league cannot afford to admit to investors, networks, and sponsors that this entire surge is almost solely attributable to one 23-year-old player. They must, at all costs, push the “league is thriving” narrative.

They will point to other factors, such as the Indiana Fever’s record 41 nationally televised games or the addition of an expansion team, to boost total attendance and viewership figures. But the truth remains unavoidable.

A Caitlin Clark preseason game (1.3 million viewers) drew a larger audience than a WNBA Finals game (1.2 million viewers). When the league’s championship series, even with a new ratings system, gets beaten by an exhibition game, the story tells itself. The “Caitlin Clark Effect” isn’t just part of the WNBA’s growth; it is the growth. And that is the one truth the league is desperate to hide.