Est. 2026

The Index

Cultural Attention, Charted

Vol. 1 · No. 17 Week of May 25 – 31, 2026 MindShare v5.2 · US Attention-Hours

The MindShare Top 50

NBA Conference Finals close at No. 1 (81.1). Game 7 (Spurs-Thunder, NBC, Saturday May 30) pulled 15.9M total viewers and peaked at 22.2M: the most-watched conference-final game since 2016, and the night Victor Wembanyama sent San Antonio to its first Finals since 2014. The closing week traces the way postseason arcs do. Game 5 near 9.5M, Game 6 at 11.6M, Game 7 at 15.9M, plus the Knicks finishing their Eastern sweep on Memorial Day. Four in-window games, roughly 110M US attention-hours. It edges Drake by six tenths of a point, and it does it without touching the 285M peak the NBA itself set on opening weekend in April.

Drake holds No. 2 (80.5) in a photo finish. Week two of Iceman / Habibti / Maid of Honour is still enormous: 39 charting tracks, 281M US weekly streams, the top six positions on Spotify all his. It decays off the debut week just enough to lose the top line by a hair. Behind the leaders, The Boroughs takes Netflix No. 1 (the Duffer Brothers’ series finishing its climb and dethroning Nemesis), Backrooms debuts NEW at No. 5 on an $81.4M opening, the biggest in A24’s history, and Euphoria’s final season holds the HBO Max top spot all week.

One note on the math. The NBA figure aggregates the four conference-final games that aired inside the Monday-to-Sunday window: the Eastern closeout on Memorial Day, plus Western Games 5 through 7. Live events are estimated at championship-sports depth against next-day Nielsen audiences. Peak holds at 285M.
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