NASCAR, Wizards-Hawks lead cable sports for Saturday May 9, 2015

Saturday’s second-round matchup where the Washington Wizards held on to beat the Atlanta Hawks at the buzzer and take a 2-1 (at the time) series lead averaged 2.382 million viewers and a 0.9 adults 18-49 rating.

The rain-delayed SpongeBob Squarepants NASCAR event in Kansas City averaged 2.48 million viewers (the ~2 hours of rain-delay programming are not included in that average).

Saturday boxing on HBO did pretty well considering HBO is only in about 30 million homes. What we’re guessing was the undercard for Canelo Alvarez vs James Kirkland averaged 1.118 million viewers and a 0.4 adults 18-49 rating between 9:09p-9:57p and with the main even drawing 1.58 million viewers and a 0.6 adults 18-49 between 9:57-10:30p.

Update, between incomplete data and not knowing how the event was scheduled (and not gleaning much from the early data we had available) we can say that boxing coverage on HBO between 9:09-9:57p averaged 1.118 million and 1.58M from 9:57-10:30. Per Tom Costello those numbers were the Pacquiao-Mayweather fight and post-fight w/the main event actually drawing 2.146M viewers (even more impressive!) between 10:30-10:45p. We didn’t see the same 1/4 hour splits as Tom Costello, but HBO recorded the 10:40-10:53p segment as 1.943 million viewers.

In NHL second-round playoff action on NBCSN, the Montreal Canadiens 2-1 victory over the Tampa Bay Lightning in game 5 of the series to stave off elimination averaged 1.018 million viewers and a 0.4 adults 18-49 rating.

On FS1 the Kansas City Royals vs Detroit Tigers game averaged 715,000 viewers and the Atlanta Braves averaged 460,000 viewers.

The Crystal Palace vs Manchester United Premier League match on NBCSN averaged 523,000 viewers.

Five hours of coverage of “The Players” PGA event on the Golf Channel from 9a-2p averaged 402,000 viewers.

Cable Sports TV Ratings for Saturday May 9, 2015:

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Note: viewership of around 100,000 or lower is technically what Nielsen refers to as a “scratch” i.e., not enough Nielsen panelists watched for Nielsen to validate it. There are around 20,000 homes in the Nielsen panel and a bit over 50,000 panelists, where 1 Nielsen panelist watching a whole telecast represents around 5,800 people.  So something averaging a million viewers averaged around 170 people out of the 50K+ panel — small, but still statistically significant. But when there’s a show with 30,000 viewers, that’s only around 5 or 6 Nielsen panelists…