Via NBAYahooSports

Los Angeles’ 102-89 win Thursday night on ABC earned a 10.4 overnight rating, up 17 percent from the 8.9 for last year’s Magic-Lakers series.

As expected, far more people were interested in the Celtics and Lakers matchup than the Lakers and Orlando matchup. If I fiddle around with the numbers at tvbythenumbers.com, it comes out to be on average 11.2 million viewers. That is simply by taking how many viewers there were at each half hour time interval (which is a fairly accurate way to go about it).

In 2008, the Celtics / Lakers series averaged 14.9 million viewers over the course of the 6 game series. Game 1 in that year brought in 13.4 million viewers total. These can't be compared with each other yet, because my math is simply an average viewship and not total viewers.

As is always the case, the number of viewers will increase as the series progresses. So if there is one good thing that came from last game, it is that people cared to watch...