Here’s something you’ve never seen before: two great professional basketball opponents, who less than three months ago slugged it out during an epic WNBA Finals series, now sitting in the same room together to promote their new hoops startup operation.
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“Yeah, it got spicy between co-founders for a little bit,” says New York Liberty center Breanna Stewart, who along with her 2024 WNBA Finals rival, Minnesota’s Napheesa Collier, are starting Unrivaled, a three-on-three women’s pro basketball league that tips off Friday night in South Florida.
The pair are conducting a joint Zoom interview with TIME from Unrivaled’s new all-purpose 130,000 sq.-ft. hoops facility outside Miami. The Liberty outlasted the Lynx in a controversial deciding Game 5: with the Lynx a few seconds away from clinching the championship, Stewart appeared to travel before benefiting from a questionable foul call at the end of regulation, allowing her to make two free throws to send the game into overtime, during which New York prevailed to win the franchise’s first-ever WNBA title.
In the postgame press conference, Minnesota coach Cheryl Reeves criticized the refs for allowing New York to play physically throughout the game and series. “This s–t was stolen from us,” she said. A few weeks later, on a podcast hosted by NBA player Paul George, Collier called the refereeing “terrible,” the non-call on Stewart’s foot-shuffling—and the whistle putting her on the foul line—“egregious.” In a GQ interview published in early January, Collier admitted she’s still not over the loss, referring to it as an “injustice.”
So, with the pair now side-by-side on my laptop screen, I had to ask: does Stewart agree with her co-founder’s stance? “What a question,” Stewart says. “Umm, I think it would probably be the heat of the moment. Everyone is feeling all different types of reactions. But one thing that we’ve said is, with all this gained attention in the WNBA, it is going to put a little bit of an extra focal point on the referees. And hopefully that’s something that we can continue to grow and build.”
Diplomatic, but a total dodge. Again: do you agree with Collier’s assessment that your title was an injustice? “No, I don’t agree with that assessment,” Stewart replies. Of course she doesn’t: just had to get it on the record. Still, none other than LeBron James spoke for many when he tweeted, after Alanna Smith was called for that foul against Stewart at the end of Game 5: “I’m sorry but that wasn’t a foul! Let the damn players dictate the outcome of a close [battle] tested game.”
So was it a foul?
“Yeah,” responds Stewart. “They reviewed it and they still called a foul, so…”
Does Collier, who’s smiling throughout this exchange, want to add anything?
“You’re just asking really pointed questions,” she says. “So I’m just laughing.”
The former college teammates at UConn, who have also teamed up for gold medals twice at the Olympics—in Tokyo and last summer in Paris—should have no problem moving past that contentious series. For Unrivaled demands their undivided attention. The league, which has raised $35 million in capital and attracted sponsors like Ally Financial, Miller Lite, and Under Armour, is seeking to build on the momentum that women’s basketball—and women’s sports in general—has seen over the past few years. Unrivaled’s success should leave little doubt there’s still plenty of upside to the boom.
Plus, for the WNBA players competing in this upstart league, Unrivaled offers an opportunity to bank significant offseason income, in the United States. On average, the 36 Unrivaled players will earn more than $220,000 in salary, which is higher than the $214,466 regular max base salary, and close to the $249,244 supermax base salary, for the 2025 WNBA season. Unrivaled also offers players equity and revenue sharing. These financial rewards incentivize players to skip suiting up for overseas pro teams during the WNBA offseason, as they’ve been doing for many years. Being in the United States during these early months of 2025 offers the ability to more easily activate sponsorship opportunities, through appearances and other commitments, while easing travel and other logistical burdens on their families.
Collier says she began thinking about Unrivaled about two-and-a-half years ago, around the time her daughter, Mila, was born. She and her husband, basketball trainer Alex Bazell, joked that they should start their own 3-on-3—not 5-on-5—league. “It’s so bogged down in the paint, especially for players in our position,” says Collier, who like Stewart is a taller player who spends time tussling down in the paint. “To showcase our skills and abilities, we had to take people off the court.”
The couple began to realize their idea had some legs. (Bazell, in fact, is now Unrivaled’s president). Stewart was a natural partner, given her ties with Collier, and the clout a now 2-time WNBA MVP and 3-time champ (about that last title…) would bring to the new league. She was sold, especially since it meant she could be home with her daughter Ruby, 3, in the offseason.
Stewart played in Turkey after the 2022 WNBA season, when Ruby was one. Getting her acclimated to a new country, and finding day care, was challenging. “There are points where you’re like, ‘is it worth it?’” says Stewart. “Yes, you’re making money. You’re experiencing new cultures, which is always a positive. But you’re missing so much.”
Unrivaled provides players with housing in South Florida. The league’s regular season and playoffs run from Jan. 17 through the March 17 championship game; regular season games generally take place on Fridays, Saturdays, and Mondays, with a midseason one-on-one tournament—featuring a $250,000 prize for the winner—unfolding the week of Feb. 10. Unlike Olympic 3×3, which is staged in a half-court setting, Unrivaled players will run up and down a full court, though one with smaller dimensions than the WNBA’s.
There are 6 teams, with names like Lunar Owls BC (Collier’s squad) and Mist BC (Stewart’s): each roster features 6 players and a coach. TNT or TruTV will broadcast every Unrivaled contest. Max will stream all the games, which are all held at the league’s Medley, Fla. facility. That space includes a practice and game court, meeting and training rooms, a cafeteria with nutritionists, a family room, child care center, and a Sephora glam room.
“I would stay here forever,” Chicago Sky forward Angel Reese, the WNBA rookie-of-the-year runner-up who will play with Unrivaled’s Rose BC, said at a recent Unrivaled media availability. “Everything I need is here—from massages, to cold tubs, to just being able to have resources, from workouts, to everything. So, just being able to be here and value women, it’s just really important right now, especially with the growth of women’s basketball.”
Unrivaled will face some competition in the new sports league space. For example TGL, an indoor golf league in which teams strike balls into simulators, and putt on real greens, debuted in early January: ESPN is televising those events. Plus, fans already have plenty of sports and entertainment options at their fingertips: will they have the brain-space to consume something else? Collier believes Unrivaled will stand out because people already watch basketball during this time of year. Plus, the league’s star power could attract an audience. Besides Collier, Stewart, and Reese, standout participants include Sabrina Ionescu, Brittney Griner, Skylar Diggins-Smith, Arike Ogunbowale, and others. “We said from the beginning, we have to get the stars for this to work,” says Collier. “We have all the best people here.”
There are some notable absences, like reigning WNBA MVP A’ja Wilson and reigning rookie of the year Caitlin Clark, whose play helped the WNBA set a slew of attendance and viewership records a season ago. “I kind of want to just stay out of the spotlight,” Clark told TIME for its 2024 Athlete of the Year feature, when asked why she’s skipping Unrivaled’s rookie campaign.
Stewart, for one, wasn’t surprised that Clark turned down Unrivaled, given that she again led Iowa to the 2024 NCAA championship game. “As someone who has gone through a college run and then gotten drafted two weeks later, and then reported to a new city and played a rookie season, it’s kind of a whirlwind,” says Stewart, who joined the Seattle Storm after leading UConn to the 2016 NCAA title, her fourth straight championship, and also played on the U.S. Olympic team in Rio that summer. “It’s definitely understandable for her to want to take some time off and just be off the court and just be a person for a little while,” says Stewart. “Hopefully down the line, she’ll want to come and see what this is all about.”
Plenty of others have shown interest through their checkbooks. Unrivaled’s investors include tennis star Coco Gauff, NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo, private equity billionaire and former Milwaukee Bucks owner Marc Lasry, University of South Carolina coach Dawn Staley, and former Warner Bros. CEO Ann Sarnoff. Unrivaled’s latest $28 million funding round was oversubscribed. “We really just hit the market at the perfect time,” says Collier, citing the steady growth of the WNBA over the past few years, plus the influx of popular young players from college who joined the pro ranks this season.
“I’m not surprised that we’re having this feedback, because for so long, we’ve tried to fight against the narrative that women’s sports is a charity, but it’s a great business investment,” says Collier. “People are seeing that, and so they want to get involved. Because it’s going to make them money.”
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