Unmatched shows a new path for women’s basketball

When Breanna Stewart of the New York Liberty steps onto the court Friday night, she won’t have a thundering crowd of 19,000 fans behind her, as she often does when she tips off at the Barclays Center.

Instead, she will play in front of just 850 fans on a sound stage near Miami.

But organizers of Unrivaled, a new 3-on-3 women’s basketball league, expect thousands more to tune in from home, drawn by a condensed format, some of the best players in the world and a tailored television approach aimed at to bring viewers close to the action.

“The content and the TV part of this is huge for us,” said Napheesa Collier, a forward for the Minnesota Lynx who founded the league with Stewart. “We want to make it the most interactive, fun and exciting experience we can for people.”

In addition to packaging the game into a digestible format, the league is also firmly centered around its athletes, providing equity stakes, childcare, on-site therapeutic services and, for many players, a higher salary for the eight-week competition than they will in the five-month Women’s National Basketball Association season.

“Success can be a lot of different things, but the most important thing is making sure the player experience was the best possible,” Stewart said. She added: “The red carpet has been rolled out.”

And it comes with deep pockets: The league announced in December that it had raised $35 million investors including Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps; tennis star Coco Gauff; Dawn Staley, women’s basketball coach at the University of South Carolina; former Knicks star Carmelo Anthony; and Geno Auriemma, University of Connecticut women’s basketball coach. Corporate sponsors include Ally Financial, cosmetics retailer Sephora and online furniture retailer Wayfair, which bought the naming rights to Unrivaled’s arena.

There are six teams – the Moon Owls, the Phantom, the Fog, the Roses, the Laces and the Vinyls – and six players per game. team. They will compete in an arena within one 23,000 square meter complex in Medley, Fla., just outside of Miami.

“It’s excellent basketball, it’s perfect spacing, it shows the skill of the athlete,” said Micky Lawler, Unrivaled’s commissioner. “It brings out the best in women’s basketball.”

While other secondary leagues have been founded in the past, analysts hope Unrivaled will set a precedent, especially for the talent it has attracted, including Brittney Griner, Angel Reese, Sabrina Ionescu and Aliyah Boston. (Two of the WNBA’s biggest stars — A’ja Wilson, a three-time winner of the league’s Most Valuable Player Award, and Caitlin Clark, the 2024 Rookie of the Year — are not participating.)

It helps that Unrivaled’s debut comes at a time of explosive growth for women’s basketball. But it’s not meant to compete with the WNBA. Instead, the organizers hope that the league, which will run until mid-Marchwill provide another opportunity — with higher visibility at home — for athletes who play overseas during the WNBA offseason, in part because of a gaping pay gap with their male counterparts in the National Basketball Association.

Unrivaled has an exclusive media rights deal with Warner Bros. Discovery, which also owns a stake in the league. Games will be one hour long and will be broadcast on TNT, the current home of many NBA games, on Friday and Monday nights and on TruTV on Saturday nights. They will also be streamed on Max.

Coverage will be anchored by Candace Parker, a three-time WNBA champion; Renee Montgomery, a former WNBA All-Star; and basketball journalist Lauren Jbara. Lisa Leslie, one of the first WNBA players, will occasionally contribute.

Players have spent the last few weeks getting used to the size of the court – 72 feet long compared to the WNBA’s regulation 94 feet – and new rules, such as allowing only one free throw per game. error. It’s all part of an effort to maximize speed and skill.

“Everyone is talking a great game about how they want to create a sport for the 21st century, and as we know, everyone has competition for their attention,” said John Learing, Unrivaled’s chief content officer. “We really wanted to create a showcase for our players to be able to maximize their offseason.”

No fan in the arena will be further than 35 feet — or as Learing put it, about five Brittney Griners — from the field. The main camera will be just 51 feet from center court, compared to 81 feet for an NBA game, Learing said.

About 18 cameras will be focused on the game, including a rail camera that runs the length of the field, Learing said. The social media team will be on standby with additional handheld cameras to create highlights.

The compressed size of the pitch and the smaller arena means that players – and fans – will be able to hear a lot more chatter on the pitch.

“It’s definitely intimate and you’re definitely going to hear a lot of things,” said Jewell Loyd, a veteran guard for the Seattle Storm who will play for the Mist. “But at the same time, that’s what you want, and it’s definitely going to make us play a little bit harder.”

Adapting the intimacy of the small arena to a national broadcast means walking a fine line between capturing basketball in a familiar form and “innovating around the game,” said Craig Barry, executive vice president and chief content officer for TNT Sports.

“You want to make sure you try things and you’re prepared to fail quickly and move on, or understand how things work and then build on that,” he said. He added: “We will learn every single week.”

TNT’s primary focus, Barry said, will be making sure fans understand who the athletes are and “why you should love them or why you should love rooting for them.” Behind the scenes access to athletes will help build and carry a narrative week after week.

Angel Reese, a guard for the Chicago Sky of the WNBA, who hosts one popular podcastput it bluntly: “This is the exposure we deserve.”

The league’s success will be measured in part by how far it pushes the boundaries of what televised sports can look like while maintaining the integrity of the sport of basketball, said Dennis Deninger, a former longtime ESPN producer who taught sports management at Syracuse University.

“You want to attract basketball fans with enhancements, not disruptions,” he said. “There are things you can do to improve this product and make it feel like it’s innovative without turning the model on its head.”

Prime time on TNT is “really important,” Deninger said, adding that it could put pressure on the WNBA to make its games easier to find on television.

Unrivaled’s organizers have created a structure for female athletes to take ownership of their future in a way they haven’t been able to before, said Nefertiti Walker, associate professor of sports management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and former college basketball player.

The players “have come together with their power and their money and influence and said, ‘We’re just going to create something completely different,'” Walker said. “It’s really powerful and probably telling of what the future of women’s sport looks like.”