Through Sunday, NBA regular season games have averaged 1.933 million viewers across ESPN, ABC and TNT, up 9% from last year (1.78M) and up a fraction of a percent from 2015-16 (1.924M). An earlier version of this post reported that the games were averaging 1.921 million. That average was based on publicly available NBA viewership figures. The 1.933 million figure is from the NBA.
(Why the discrepancy? The publicly available data reported on this site and others is not always the final word from Nielsen. For ESPN programs, Nielsen will later add additional data from OTT, computer and mobile devices. For example, the initial reported figure for the November 22 Warriors-Thunder game was 3.230 million viewers, but that rose to 3.282 million with OTT streaming data included. The NBA and the networks have the updated data, which is not always available to industry sites.)