Nielsen this month published its Spring 2026 Tops of Sports report, documenting a sweeping shift in who watches professional sport in the United States - and why. Across four leagues, the data points to the same underlying forces: entertainment crossovers, new distribution infrastructure, and an influx of international talent are collectively pulling younger, more diverse audiences toward sports that once struggled to hold their attention.

The report covers the 2025-26 NBA season, the NHL regular season and playoffs, IndyCar racing, and the PGA Tour. Each chapter carries specific audience figures drawn from Nielsen National TV and Live Streaming Ratings, Nielsen Fan Insights, and Nielsen Scarborough. The breadth of the data makes this one of the more useful cross-sport snapshots available to media planners and brand strategists heading into the back half of 2026.

NBA: new deals, bigger numbers, same stars

The most straightforward story in the report involves basketball. According to Nielsen, the NBA's new distribution deals produced a 27% increase in average audience for the 2025-26 regular season, with an additional 10% lift in the early rounds of the playoffs. The league now reaches what the report describes as a younger-skewing audience on streaming while still drawing larger crowds on broadcast and cable - a combination that has eluded many rights holders as they negotiate the move to multi-platform distribution.

Amazon Prime Video began exclusive NBA coverage with an October 24 doubleheader, marking the start of its 11-year deal with the league. The structural effect of that arrangement is now visible in the viewership numbers. The NBA's rights now span NBC, Prime Video, ABC, and ESPN, which Nielsen's 2026 Upfront Planning Guide had identified as the central case study for how sports rights fragmentation plays out in practice. Sports represented nearly 30% of all ad-supported TV viewing among adults 25 to 54 in Q4 2025, according to that earlier report.

What the Spring Tops of Sports adds is a close-up view of how individual players drive the numbers. According to Nielsen, 63% of fans say they started following the NBA because of a specific player. That figure, drawn from Nielsen Fan Insights covering April through December 2025, helps explain why the correlation between the most-viewed players on social media and the most-watched teams on television is so tight.

The social media leaderboard

According to Nielsen and the NBA, the top-ranked player for social and digital views during the 2025-26 regular season was LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers, with 2.85 billion views. Victor Wembanyama of the San Antonio Spurs ranked second at 2.43 billion, and Luka Doncic of the Los Angeles Lakers placed third at 2.11 billion. Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors followed at 1.87 billion, ahead of Nikola Jokic of the Denver Nuggets at 1.23 billion. The remaining top-ten positions went to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of the Oklahoma City Thunder at 1.14 billion, Kevin Durant of the Houston Rockets at 1.03 billion, Anthony Edwards of the Minnesota Timberwolves at 982 million, Cooper Flagg of the Dallas Mavericks at 963 million, and Austin Reaves of the Los Angeles Lakers at 696 million.

When mapped against team viewership, the overlap is substantial. All but three teams in the top-10 most-watched list have a player in the NBA's top 10 for social views. The most-watched team overall was the Oklahoma City Thunder, followed by the Los Angeles Lakers, New York Knicks, Houston Rockets, and Denver Nuggets. The New York Knicks and Boston Celtics did not place players in the social top 10, but both are major-market franchises that made the playoffs. Cleveland's Donovan Mitchell, whose team ranked 10th in viewership, has nearly four million followers on Instagram - enough to be notable, just not enough to crack the top-ten social list.

Prime Video this week begins exclusive global coverage of the 2026 NBA Finals, with the New York Knicks facing the San Antonio Spurs - the first Finals matchup between the two clubs since 1999. The series caps the first full season of Amazon's 11-year broadcasting agreement, a deal that reshaped how basketball reaches audiences outside North America.

Hockey: a streaming drama and an Olympic gold

The NHL's viewership trajectory in 2026 has one unusually specific origin point. According to Nielsen, HBO Max launched a romantic drama called Heated Rivalry in late 2025, set in the world of professional ice hockey. The series accumulated nearly two billion streaming minutes in the first quarter of 2026 alone. The halo effect on the NHL was, by the report's own description, immediate: the league's official TikTok account saw its follower count jump 83% after the show's debut.

That pop culture momentum fed into a major sporting event. The Olympic Winter Games Milano Cortina 2026 took place in February, and both the U.S. men's and women's hockey teams won gold medals, drawing record viewership. The milestone carried additional weight because it marked the first time NHL players had participated in the Winter Olympics since 2014. The cultural and athletic threads converged at the Opening Ceremony, where Heated Rivalry stars Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie participated in the Olympic Torch Relay.

The numbers at the close of the NHL regular season were striking. According to Nielsen, average viewership was up 25%, with an additional 28% bump among women 18 and older. The first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs produced an even sharper lift: viewership rose 77% compared to the equivalent period a year earlier. Nielsen's 2026 report on women's sports, published in March, had already flagged the gold-medal game between the USA and Canada at the Milan Olympics as a milestone moment, averaging 5.3 million viewers and peaking at 7.7 million.

The affluence angle

The report includes a median income table for sports TV audiences that will be of direct interest to media buyers. The NHL Regular Season 2025-26 ranks third overall, with a median audience income of $112,000 - behind only Formula 1 at $121,400 and the 2026 Men's NCAA Tournament at $115,200. Grand Slam Tennis sits fourth at $111,800. By contrast, the 2025-26 NBA Regular Season sits further down the table at $86,800, alongside the 2026 Women's NCAA Tournament at $86,300 and the 2025 WNBA Regular Season at $73,800.

The practical implication is that the NHL's recent viewership growth comes with an audience profile that many premium advertisers already prize. The sport's viewership gains have expanded that base rather than diluted it: the report notes women 18 and older now make up roughly 35% of the NHL audience, about 10 percentage points below what the Professional Women's Hockey League (PWHL) delivered on its national TV debut in March.

The PWHL's national debut

The PWHL drew about 133,000 viewers for its first national broadcast on ION, a matchup between the New York Sirens and Montreal Victoire. Women 18 and older accounted for 45% of that audience - about 10 percentage points higher than the NHL's own female audience share. According to Nielsen, that figure puts the PWHL on par with the National Women's Soccer League in audience composition, a benchmark the NWSL itself has worked years to build. The presence of recognizable players such as Hilary Knight has helped establish the league's visibility with fans and brands alike.

Sports now represent 5% of global SVOD content, according to a recent Gracenote Data Hub update, with HBO Max holding 35% of all available sports programming at the show level. The same infrastructure that drove Heated Rivalry's two-billion-minute streaming run is increasingly central to how sports leagues build awareness beyond their core audience.

IndyCar: the quiet growth story

Formula 1 has attracted substantial media coverage in recent years. Netflix's Drive to Survive documentary brought new audiences to the sport, and the 2025 F1 the Movie - starring Brad Pitt and Damson Idris - achieved a successful box office run alongside four Academy Award nominations. IndyCar, running parallel to that attention, has been building its own audience with considerably less fanfare.

The headline data point is the Indianapolis 500. According to Nielsen, last year's race averaged over seven million viewers - the highest figure in 17 years. Alex Palou of Spain won the race, becoming the first Spanish driver to take the 500 victory, and subsequently claimed his fourth series championship. Mexico's Pato O'Ward, described in the report as one of the most followed personalities in the paddock, has contributed to a significant shift in the series' demographic profile. IndyCar saw a 64% jump in Hispanic viewership in 2025 compared to 2024, a figure the report attributes to the series' growing roster of international talent.

Full-season figures tell a similar story. The 2025 IndyCar season averaged 1.4 million viewers, up from 1.3 million in 2023 and recovering from a dip to 1.1 million in both 2022 and 2024 - the latter attributed in part to more races airing on cable rather than broadcast. The 2026 series is already outpacing those numbers: according to Nielsen, the first five races of 2026 averaged 1.2 million viewers, 44% higher than the same period in 2025.

Interest tracking

Viewership is not the only metric showing movement. According to Nielsen Fan Insights, 19% of respondents reported being somewhat or very interested in IndyCar as of March 2026. That is up from 15% in March 2023 - a four-percentage-point gain over three years, drawn from the same survey instrument and therefore directly comparable. The combination of that interest growth with the specific demographic shift toward Hispanic audiences gives IndyCar an unusual profile for 2026: it is growing both in absolute terms and in diversity simultaneously.

Amazon's ad chief has described Prime Video and live sports as now forming a single full-funnel advertising business, with inventory spanning Thursday Night Football, NBA games, and UEFA Champions League coverage. IndyCar's audience expansion fits within the broader context of that infrastructure buildout: as sports rights distribute across more platforms, audiences that were once hard to reach through a single broadcast window become accessible.

PGA Tour: social media, diversity, and a new CEO

Golf has been building steadily. According to Nielsen, viewing of major PGA Tour events grew year over year in 2025, and that growth has continued into 2026. Through the first events of the year - covering PGA Tour events through May 2, 2026 - the Tour is averaging 1.5 million viewers, up 21% compared to the same period in 2025.

Two separate forces appear to be driving that growth, and a third may be emerging. The first is social media. Nielsen Scarborough data shows a steady increase in interest in the PGA Tour since 2023. The percentage of respondents describing themselves as very or somewhat interested in the Tour rose from 10.8% in May 2023 to 13.8% by October 2025 - the highest point in the tracking series. Brian Rolapp, who joined the tour as CEO from the NFL, has publicly committed to accelerating the Tour's social media strategy.

The second force is recreational golf participation. The share of Americans who played golf in the past 12 months rose from 11.0% in the May 2021 wave of Nielsen Scarborough to 13.8% in October 2025, after a period of gradual decline in the mid-2010s. The data does not establish a direct causal link between playing and watching, but the parallel trends suggest the two are moving together.

The third force is demographic. According to Nielsen, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) viewership of PGA Tour events is up 12% so far in 2026. The report points to a specific cohort of players driving that shift: Japanese American Collin Morikawa, Indian American Akshay Bhatia, and South Korean Si Woo Kim are identified as contributing to the tour's expanded audience reach.

Why the measurement context matters

For marketing professionals, these four sport stories are inseparable from the broader measurement infrastructure. Nielsen pilots wearable technology to count co-viewers during Super Bowl LX and major live events, a program that runs through the first half of 2026 with the goal of incorporating co-viewing data into currency measurement during the 2026-2027 season. If that methodology enhancement goes live, reported sports audiences - which already generate group viewing at above-average rates - could rise further.

The Spring 2026 Tops of Sports report arrives as the upfront and newfront negotiation season is underway. Gracenote's Q2 2026 Data Hub update found that sports now accounts for 5% of all programming across the six leading global SVOD services - a near-tripling of the 1.4% share sports held across the original five platforms tracked in November 2024. The simultaneous growth across four different sports in the Spring report suggests the phenomenon extends well beyond any single franchise moment.

The cross-media measurement challenge is particularly acute for sports, which Nielsen describes as requiring tools that can track audiences across broadcast, cable, and streaming simultaneously. Nielsen's 2025 Tops of Sports report, released the previous year, found that total viewing for streaming sports documentaries reached 16.9 million minutes among U.S. viewers in 2024 - up 260% from 2021. Heated Rivalry's two-billion-minute figure in Q1 2026 alone suggests that category has expanded substantially since that baseline was recorded.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Nielsen, a global audience measurement company, released the Spring 2026 edition of its Tops of Sports report. The findings cover four major sports properties - the NBA, NHL, IndyCar, and the PGA Tour - and are directed at advertisers, media buyers, and brand strategists.

What: The report documents viewership increases across all four sports during the 2025-26 season, with the NBA up 27% for the regular season and 10% for early playoff rounds, the NHL up 25% for the regular season and 77% for the first round of playoffs, IndyCar's first five 2026 races averaging 1.2 million viewers (44% above the same period in 2025), and the PGA Tour averaging 1.5 million viewers through early May 2026 (up 21% year over year). The data traces the growth to three converging forces: entertainment crossovers such as HBO Max's Heated Rivalry drama, new distribution deals across streaming and broadcast platforms, and an influx of international talent attracting new demographic groups.

When: The Spring 2026 Tops of Sports report was published in June 2026. The underlying data covers the 2025-26 sports season, with NBA regular season and playoff data, NHL regular season and first-round playoff data, IndyCar season data through early 2026, and PGA Tour data through May 2, 2026.

Where: All viewership figures reflect U.S. audiences, measured across broadcast networks, cable channels, and streaming platforms. Nielsen's measurement draws on its National TV and Live Streaming Ratings (Live + Same Day, Big Data + Panel), Nielsen Fan Insights survey data, and Nielsen Scarborough consumer research.

Why: The combination of entertainment crossovers driving new audience cohorts, streaming infrastructure enabling multi-platform reach, and international talent expanding demographic diversity is reshaping the composition of sports audiences at speed. For the marketing community, the data carries direct implications for media planning: the NHL's affluent audience skew is now accompanied by strong viewership growth; IndyCar is reaching Hispanic audiences at a 64% higher rate than a year ago; and the PGA Tour is gaining AANHPI viewers as young Asian talent enters the tour's upper ranks. Sports accounted for nearly 30% of all ad-supported TV viewing among adults 25-54 in Q4 2025, according to Nielsen's 2026 Upfront Planning Guide, making the precise demographic and platform composition of sports audiences commercially significant in a way that goes well beyond raw viewership totals.