Mavericks’ loss also falls short in Dallas-Fort Worth ratings

Luckily for American Idol, it was over before the Mavs game began.

Game 2 of the Dallas Mavericks-Oklahoma City Thunder Western Conference Finals towered over all other Thursday night attractions while suffering some Nielsen seepage from Tuesday's opener.

The Thunder's 106-100 victory averaged 741,050 D-FW viewers on ESPN, with a peak crowd of 941,895 between 10 and 10:15 p.m., when competing late night local newscasts took another May "sweeps" beating. Game 1 drew 803,381 viewers, peaking at 1,018,078.

Game 2 also fell a little shy with advertiser-craved 18-to-49-year-olds, averaging 434,359 viewers in this key demographic compared to Game 1's 450,812.

Those are still humongous numbers, with Fox's American Idol results show (it'll be an all-teen Final 2 of Scott McCreery/Lauren Alaina) running a pretty distant second-best with 616,387 total viewers and 218,253 in the 18-to-49 age range. Luckily for Idol, it was over before the Mavs game began at 8:07 p.m. and ended at 10:44 p.m.

NBC's guest star-studded season finale of The Office drew 159,291 total viewers to finish fourth in that measurement in the 8 p.m. hour. But it improved to second place among 18-to-49-year-olds, trailing only ABC's Grey's Anatomy season-ender in the broadcast network universe.

CBS' two-hour season finale of The Mentalist had the most total viewers (other than the Mavs) from 8 to 10 p.m., drawing 346,285.

Early on CBS, Katie Couric's little-heralded sign-off after five years of anchoring the CBS Evening News tied ABC's World News for second at 5:30 p.m. with 131,588 total viewers. Both of them were edged by Fox4's local newscast, which had 138,514 viewers. But Couric bombed with 25-to-54-year-olds (the main advertiser target audience for news programming), running sixth behind Fox4's news, World News, CW33's Family Guy repeat, the NBC Nightly News and MY27's rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond.

In Thursday's four-way local news derby races, CBS11 took the top spots at 10 p.m. in both total viewers and 25-to-54-year-olds.

Fox4 again did likewise at 6 a.m. while also winning at 6 p.m. with 25-to-54-year-olds and tying for first in total viewers with WFAA8 and CBS11.

At 5 p.m. CBS11 won outright in total viewers; the 25-to-54 golds were shared by Fox4 and WFAA8.