NEW YORK – The Finals 2016 – a thrilling seven-game series that saw the Cleveland Cavaliers defeat the Golden State Warriors to make history by becoming the first team to come back from a 3-1 deficit in The Finals – set new records across television, social, digital and retail.

Highlights include:

ABC: The seven-game series was the most-watched NBA Finals in ABC history, and most-watched since 1998, averaging 20,215,000 viewers per game.

• Game 7 averaged 31,018,000 viewers – peaking with 44,807,000 viewers – the third-most-watched NBA game on record.

Tencent: In China, a Finals-record 65.9 million total viewers watched the series live on Tencent’s digital assets.

• Game 7 had 15.3 million unique viewers, the most-viewed NBA game ever in China on digital platforms.

Social Media: A record 5.2 billion impressions and 800 million video views were generated during The Finals across social platforms.

• Twitter:  The end of Game 7 garnered 337,000 tweets per minute, the top-tweeted moment in Finals history and most-tweeted U.S. sports moment in 2016.

• Facebook: Cavaliers-Warriors was the most-talked about NBA Finals ever on Facebook, with a record 43 million people posting, liking, sharing and commenting more than 269 million times.
• Vine: @NBA ranked No. 1 among all Vine accounts last week with 76.5 million loops.

NBA TV:  NBA GameTime, the network’s signature studio show, delivered its most-viewed postgame coverage of all time for The Finals averaging 258,000 viewers for the series, including a record 553,000 viewers for its Game 7 coverage.

NBA Digital: NBA.com and the NBA App tallied a record 1.9 billion page views and 1.4 billion video views, eclipsing the previous records of 1.1 billion and 400 million respectively, set during last year’s NBA Finals. 

NBAmoji App: Unveiled during The Finals, the free NBAmoji App ranked No. 1 in the sports section of the App Store.

• NBA Finals-related emojis were used more than 800,000 times.

Merchandise: The day after Game 7, NBAStore.com had its highest sales day in store history, breaking the previous record set last season.

• The Cavaliers’ 2016 NBA Champions Locker Room T-shirt is the top-selling item on NBAStore.com and the best-selling Locker Room T-shirt in the site’s history.
• During The Finals NBAStore.com generated record-breaking merchandise sales, up nearly 50 percent from the previous record achieved during last year’s Finals.