WNBA stars Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier are co-founding a new 3-on-3 women’s basketball league to give WNBA players an option to play domestically in the offseason, they told ESPN on Thursday.
The “Unrivaled” basketball league would run from January through March, and would feature 30 of the top women’s professional players on six teams. These teams would play 3-on-3 games and 1-on-1 at a soundstage in Miami, per ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne.
Stewart and Collier are hoping that they can raise enough in private funding and sponsorship opportunities to provide participants with pay similar to what they would receive during the WNBA season. Ordinarily, many WNBA players head overseas in the offseason to play international basketball. However, the WNBA adopted prioritization rules as part of the 2020 collective bargaining agreement, which require players to return from overseas by the start of training camp to be eligible for the season. These prioritization rules are set to go into full effect next season. The overseas season runs through mid-May, which conflicts with the start of the WNBA campaign. The goal of the Unrivaled league is to help players offset the lucrative contracts overseas that the WNBA players would have to give up due to these rules in the CBA.
“It’s the ability for players to stay home, to be in a market like Miami where we can just be the buzz and create that with the best WNBA players,” Stewart told ESPN. “We can’t keep fighting [the WNBA’s prioritization rule]. It is a rule that takes away our choices [overseas], which should never be a thing, especially as women, but it is still a rule.”
Stewart discussed the idea of founding the league with Collier and Collier’s husband Alex Bazzell.
“We’ve all been talking and realizing that we’re missing a moment, having a lot of our players be overseas or not playing basketball [during the offseason],” Stewart said. “I think top players, they want to be playing, right? They want to be home, they want to be playing, but it has to make sense. It has to be right and the money has to be right. And I think that’s what Unrivaled is trying to do.”
