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Angel Reese and the Chicago Sky will face Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever in prime time to tip off the inaugural WNBA Rivals Week in August.
Other games will include two between the New York Liberty and Minnesota Lynx in a WNBA Finals rematch; a matchup of Paige Bueckers and the Dallas Wings against Clark and the Fever; and the Atlanta Dream’s Brittney Griner facing her old Phoenix Mercury squad.
The week will be sponsored by Ally Financial, the newest partner for the league this season.
“You can have a great partnership, but you also have to have great activation,” WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert said in a Zoom interview. “There’s going to be a full slate of games that week and that’s going to be a cool part of the activation.”
Rivalry-week games will be broadcast on a variety of networks, starting with the prime-time game between the Sky and Fever on Aug. 9 on CBS.
“The timing of that week is critical because in August you start to really make that playoff push,” Engelbert said. “So it would be great to have those matchups during that period to drive that playoff push into September and crown a champion in October.”
The NBA has had a Rivals Week for three years.
Engelbert has mentioned in the past how important rivalries can be to grow the sport. The league started the Commissioner’s Cup in 2021, and that in-season tournament has helped spawn rivalries between the Liberty and Las Vegas Aces as well as the Liberty and Lynx over the past few seasons.
“To have two teams who are just competing extremely hard every single time they match up and every time you watch is great basketball,” said Bueckers, the UConn star whom the Wings are widely expected to select Monday with the No. 1 pick in the WNBA draft. “So I think it was a perfect opportunity to start that — there’s so many great rivalries in the league.”
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This isn’t Ally’s first foray into women’s basketball. It was one of the inaugural partners with the 3-on-3 Unrivaled league that finished its first season last month. The conversations with the WNBA started years before Unrivaled came into existence.
“What Cathy and her team have done with the league — the cultural currency of the players, the media connectivity, the entire ecosystem — is just phenomenal,” said Andrea Brimmer, Ally Financial’s chief marketing officer. “To me it’s kind of the crown jewel of what’s happening in the women’s sports space.”
Ally also signed Bueckers to an endorsement deal. The company already has deals with WNBA players Breanna Stewart and Sydney Colson.
Originally Published: April 11, 2025 at 8:59 AM CDT
