Unrivaled Charts a New Path for Women’s Basketball

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

Instead, she will be playing in front of just 850 fans on a soundstage near Miami.

But organizers of Unrivaled, a new 3-on-3 women’s basketball league, are banking that thousands more will tune in from home, drawn by a condensed format, some of the best players in the world and a made-for-TV approach that aims to bring viewers close to the action.

“The content piece and the TV piece 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 in a digestible format, the league is also firmly centered around its athletes, providing equity stakes, child care, on-site therapeutic services and, for many players, a higher salary for the eight-week competition than they will make in the five-month Women’s National Basketball Association season.

“Success can be a bunch of different things, but most importantly it’s making sure the player experience was the best one possible,” Stewart said. She added, “The red carpet is rolled out.”

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

There are six teams — the Lunar Owls, the Phantom, the Mist, the Roses, the Laces and the Vinyls — and six players per team. They will compete in an arena inside a 23,000-square-foot complex in Medley, Fla., just outside Miami.

“It’s basketball excellence, it’s perfect spacing, it’s showcasing the athlete’s skill set,” said Micky Lawler, Unrivaled’s commissioner. “It’s bringing out the best of women’s basketball.”

While other secondary leagues have foundered in the past, analysts are hopeful that Unrivaled will set a precedent, most notably for the talent it has attracted, including Brittney Griner, Angel Reese, Sabrina Ionescu and Aliyah Boston. (Two of the W.N.B.A.’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 is not meant to compete with the W.N.B.A. Rather, organizers hope the league, which will run through mid-March, will provide another option — with higher visibility at home — for athletes who play overseas during the W.N.B.A. off-season, in part because of a yawning 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 an hour long and will be broadcast on TNT, the current home of many N.B.A. 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 W.N.B.A. champion; Renee Montgomery, a former W.N.B.A. All-Star; and the basketball journalist Lauren Jbara. Lisa Leslie, one of the first W.N.B.A. players, will contribute on occasion.

Players have spent the last few weeks getting accustomed to the size of the court — 72 feet long versus the W.N.B.A.’s regulation 94 feet — and new rules, such as allowing only one free throw per foul. It’s all part of an effort to maximize speed and skill.

“Everybody talks a great game about how they want to create a sport for the 21st century, and as we know, everybody has competition for their attention spans,” said John Learing, Unrivaled’s chief content officer. “We really wanted to create a showcase for our players to be able to maximize their off-season.”

No fan in the arena will be farther than 35 feet — or as Learing put it, about five Brittney Griners — from the court. The main camera will be only 51 feet from center court, compared with 81 feet for an N.B.A. game, Learing said.

About 18 cameras will be focused on the game, including a rail camera that runs the length of the court, Learing said. The social media team will be on standby with additional hand-held cameras to create highlight reels.

The compressed size of the court and the smaller arena mean players — and fans — will be able to hear much more on-court chatter.

“It’s definitely intimate, and you’re definitely going to hear a lot of stuff,” 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 harder.”

Adapting the intimacy of the small arena for 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 that you’re trying things and you’re prepared to fail quickly and move on, or understand how things are working and then build on that,” he said. He added, “We’re going to 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 to root against 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 W.N.B.A., who hosts a popular podcast, put 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 preserving the integrity of the sport of basketball, said Dennis Deninger, a former longtime producer at ESPN 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 enhance this product and make it feel like it’s innovative without tipping the model upside down.”

The prime-time slot on TNT is “really important,” Deninger said, adding that it could put pressure on the W.N.B.A. to make its games easier to find on television.

Unrivaled’s organizers have created a structure for women athletes to take ownership of their future in a way they haven’t been able to before, said Nefertiti Walker, an associate professor of sports management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a 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 totally different,’” Walker said. “That’s really powerful and probably telling for what the future of women’s sports looks like.”