Sports Media Roundtable: Can Victor Wembanyama follow LeBron James and Steph Curry as the NBA's top media draw?; how valuable are the NFL's international games?; the NHL's TV windows

Sports Media Roundtable: Can Victor Wembanyama follow LeBron James and Steph Curry as the NBA's top media draw?; how valuable are the NFL's international games?; the NHL's TV windows

From Sports Media with Richard Deitsch by Audacy

May 23, 2026 · 37 min

About this episode

The episode discusses the potential of Victor Wembanyama as a media draw in the NBA, the value of NFL international games, and the NHL's TV performance.

Episode 624 of the Sports Media Podcast features Jon Lewis, editor and founder of Sports Media Watch and Sports Business Journal media reporter Austin Karp. In this podcast, we discuss Victor Wembanyama as a longterm television draw; why Wembanyama looks like the league's most attractive media commodity heading forward; Spurs-Thunder Game 1 averaging a combined 9.16 million viewers on NBC across Nielsen and a streaming audience measured by Adobe Analytics, officially marking the largest audience on record for a Game 1 of the West Finals; Fox taking a studio show on the road for the World Cup; the NFL owners voting to drop the policy allowing them to protect their two most lucrative home games from being scheduled overseas; NASCAR no longer report Nielsen “Big Data + Panel” figures for its races, returning to the “panel-only” methodology; the NHL seeing its best conference semifinals on record, as ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, TBS, TNT and truTV averaged 1.9 million viewers for all second-round games, and more.You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and more.

People in this episode

Host: Richard Deitsch

Guests: Jon Lewis, Austin Karp

Topics covered

  • Victor Wembanyama
  • NBA media draw
  • NFL international games
  • NHL TV ratings
  • sports media analysis

Keywords

  • Victor Wembanyama
  • NBA
  • NFL
  • international games
  • NHL
  • TV ratings
  • sports media

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: NBC, Fox, NASCAR, NHL, ABC, ESPN, ESPN2, TBS, TNT, truTV

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