There was no doubt that going against Game 5 of the NBA Finals was going to hurt WWE on Monday night, and it did with the show posting its lowest viewership of 2019.
The three-hour broadcast of Raw averaged 2,125,000 viewers on the USA Network. The Toronto Raptors vs. Golden State Warriors game began at 9 pm Eastern and did enormous with 18,217,000 viewers on ABC.
The first hour of Raw, which avoided going against the game, averaged 2.38 million viewers. Once the NBA game began, Raw fell 12.4% and averaged 2.086 million viewers before falling another 8.5% in the third hour to 1.91 million viewers.
The show built to the main event involving Seth Rollins and Kevin Owens in a non-title match with Sami Zayn as the special outside referee.
While it was Raw’s lowest number of 2019, it did perform better than the episodes that aired on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve last year, which averaged 1.775 and 1.968 million viewers respectively.
Monday was the final week of competition from the NBA and NHL with both finals wrapping up by Sunday at the latest.
