Smackdown Rating Gets Hammered By NBA Heading Into Money in the Bank, Draws New Low In Viewership

– The rating for the Money in the Bank go-home edition of Smackdown was blasted by a whole lot of NBA, and a little NHL to boot. Tuesday night’s episode brought in a 0.56 rating in the 18 – 49 demographic and 1.827 million viewers. Those numbers were down 20% and 5% respectively from last week’s 0.7 demo rating and 1.931 million viewers. The rating was only slightly above the USA Network low 0.54 from two weeks ago, while the audience dipped under that week’s 1.833 million to hit a new low on the network.

In all fairness to Smackdown, they had hefty competition. All of the top programs of the evening on cable were live sports programming, the most direct competition to WWE. The NBA game came in at #1 (per Showbuzz Daily) with a powerful 2.79 demo rating and 7.315 million viewers, followed by the Draft Lottery that preceded the NBA game (1.68 demo rating, 4.427 million). Those were both directly up against Smackdown, as was “NBA: The Jump” before the Draft Lottery (#4 at 0.75 demo rating/2.040 million) and the NHL Conference finals (#5 at 0.64/1.904 million). Still, even with those caveats, this is a fairly rough number for Smackdown, a show which had just bounced back from getting battered a couple of weeks ago.