Steph Curry and the Warriors, who won 73 games during the regular season, clawed back from a 3-1 series deficit to win the next three games and advance past Kevin Durant and the Thunder for a berth in the NBA Finals. According to Nielsen’s Twitter TV data, game 6 and game 7 of the conference finals attracted a combined 3.61 million tweets sent from 1.21 million unique Twitter accounts. Monday night’s game 7 finale attracted the lion share of the Twitter activity, with the game accumulating 2.32 million tweets sent from 769,000 unique Twitter accounts.
Those two games made it seem as if nothing else was being talked about on Twitter the entire Memorial Day weekend. Starting Friday, 20 different TV shows and 18 other sporting events charted in Twitter’s daily TV ratings. Those shows and events combined for a Memorial Day weekend haul of 2.54 million tweets sent from 932,8000 unique Twitter accounts. The Golden State Warriors duels with the Oklahoma City Thunder attracted more than a million more tweets sent from more than 250,000 more unique Twitter accounts.
This is no small feat as those two games were up against Game of Thrones, the Indianapolis 500, Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Finals, the French Open, and the History Channel’s debut of its new miniseries Roots, the retelling of the Alex Haley’s 1976 novel of the same name.
Curry and company also obliterated the Twitter activity of Lebron James’ Cleveland Cavaliers, the Warriors’ upcoming opponent in the NBA Finals. The Cavaliers eliminated the Toronto Raptors from the Eastern Conference Finals in game 6 on Friday. That game only attracted 413,00 tweets sent from 176,000 unique Twitter accounts, a fraction of the Twitter activity from either one of the Warriors’ games with the Thunder this weekend.
Curry’s brilliant performance in game 7 led the Warriors to a second consecutive NBA Finals appearance and affected more screens than those watched by people who tweet. Monday night’s game had an overnight rating of 11.2, the highest-rated NBA game on cable television ever.
