WNBA All-Star Game sets attendance record, surpasses NBA All-Star for first time

On Saturday night at the United Center in Chicago, 19,783 fans attended the WNBA All-Star game — the largest crowd in event history, surpassing the 2007 record of 19,487 fans.

Remarkably, the WNBA All-Star Game also drew more attendees than the NBA's own All-Star Game this year, when 15,973 fans attended the NBA event at the Los Angeles Clippers' Intuit Dome in February. It is the first time in history that the WNBA has outdrawn the NBA at the All-Star Game.

While the Intuit Dome caps out at around 18,000 for basketball and the United Center holds nearly 21,000, even a sold-out Intuit Dome would not have matched Saturday's crowd in Chicago. Notably, Chicago did not have a single hometown Sky player in the All-Star game.

A Show Worthy of a Crowd

Team Spoon, assembled by Hall of Famer Teresa Weatherspoon in this year's legends-as-general-managers format, beat Cynthia Cooper's Team Coop 129-122. New York Liberty center Jonquel Jones earned MVP honors off the bench with 22 points, 13 rebounds, and 8 assists, narrowly missing just the second triple-double in All-Star Game history. She dedicated the award to her late aunt, whose memorial was held that same day.

Caitlin Clark added 17 points, including several deep three-pointers that helped her team amass an early lead. Kelsey Mitchell led all scorers with 28 points for Team Coop, while rookie Olivia Miles posted a double-double. Seattle's Nneka Ogwumike quietly made history of her own, passing Maya Moore to become the All-Star Game's all-time leading scorer in her 11th All-Star appearance.

Record Crowd Is No Outlier

If the All-Star attendance record were an isolated data point, some might dismiss it as a one-night event in a large NBA building. Instead, the event's popularity serves as the hallmark of a first half of the WNBA regular season that has surpassed nearly every benchmark the league has collected over previous decades.

Speaking at the All-Star weekend press conference, Commissioner Cathy Engelbert declared that 2026 is "already the most-watched WNBA season of all time" at the halfway mark. Engelbert noted that the league has reached more than 73 million unique viewers through 117 national broadcasts. For context, viewership reached 63 million across all of last season — which was a record at that time as well. So far, 29 WNBA games have averaged more than a million viewers before the All-Star break. Last season, 11 games hit those totals across the entire season. In addition to record viewership, league-wide attendance is also up 16 percent.

Key individual data points:

• The WNBA season opened with 2.49 million viewers for the Wings vs. Fever matchup on ABC, the league's fourth-largest audience of any kind since 2000.
• In mid-July, the Fever vs. Aces matchup drew roughly 2.64 million, and days later the Liberty vs. Fever matchup averaged 2.58 million on CBS with a peak above 3 million.
• Earlier this month, the Toronto Tempo drew 20,996 fans to Montreal's Bell Centre for a game against Dallas, setting a regular-season single-game attendance record.

Investment Leads to Growth

Preferences do not develop in isolation of consistent investment, marketing, promotion, and prime-time broadcast slots. Part of the sustained growth in viewership and attendance across the current WNBA season is due to continued increases in overall investment and strategic broadcast windows. In its 30th season, the WNBA and its networks have placed a record 216 of its 330 regular-season games on national television, spread across a roster of partners that includes: ABC/ESPN, NBC/Peacock, CBS, Prime Video, ION, USA Network, and NBA TV. The league also continues to invest.