With Christmas falling on a Sunday this season, the NFL took full advantage with its first-ever holiday triple-header that expectedly dominated the ratings. But it didn't appear to hurt the NBA. While trailing the NFL by steep margins, the NBA managed a notable uptick in viewership from 2021 over the course of its five-game slate.

Per Sports Media watch, Sunday's Green Bay Packers win over the Miami Dolphins won the Christmas ratings battle with an average audience of 25.92 million on Sunday, the NFL's eighth-highest viewership of the season and the league's second-largest Christmas day audience ever. A Los Angeles Rams blowout of the Denver Broncos finished second on Sunday with 21.67 million viewers, while the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' win over the Arizona Cardinals tallied 17.15 million viewers. The Packers-Dolphins game eclipsed the combined average viewership of all five NBA games (21.8 million) while Rams-Broncos nearly matched it.

But it wasn't necessarily bad news for the NBA. Its top draw was its ABC broadcast of the Boston Celtics' win over the Milwaukee Bucks, which averaged 6.08 million viewers. The other four NBA games across ESPN and ABC drew between 2.52 million (Suns-Nuggets) and 4.75 million (Grizzlies-Warriors) viewers, per SMW.