Breanna Stewart outduels Kelsey Plum as Mist claim Unrivaled championship

Everywhere Breanna Stewart goes, she wins.

In college, the WNBA, the World Cup, the Olympics, EuroLeague and now Unrivaled. The Mist captain had 32 points, four rebounds, four assists, two blocks and two steals to lead her team to an 80-74 victory over Phantom for the 2026 Unrivaled championship Wednesday night.

Stewart wasn’t herself throughout the 2025 season, but the Unrivaled co-founder persisted through a knee injury she suffered during the 2024 WNBA Finals to help launch the new league. Mist missed the playoffs and Stewart was blanked in the first round of the 1-on-1 tournament, an uncharacteristic showing for one of the game’s all-time greats.

The 2026 campaign was more like it for Stewart. She finished second-team all-Unrivaled, had the game-winning offensive rebound and assist in the semifinal win over Breeze and then led the way in the title game Wednesday. She scored the game-winning points at the free-throw line, securing victory and championship game MVP honors.

“I’ve seen it for years,” Mist head coach Zach O’Brien said on the court postgame. “I watched (Stewart) moment after moment just capitalize and close like that, so I had no doubt.”

Arike Ogunbowale chipped in with 19 points off the bench, and Alanna Smith and Allisha Gray added 12 and 11, respectively. Mist needed all of that offensive firepower to counter a heroic effort from Phantom’s Kelsey Plum, who scored 40 points to keep her team competitive without the injured Aliyah Boston.

The six players on Mist will split a $600,000 purse, double that received by Rose, the winning team in the inaugural 2025 season.

The theme of Unrivaled’s second season was expansion. The league added two new teams and a bevy of young stars, including the top four picks in the 2025 WNBA Draft: Paige Bueckers, Dominique Malonga, Sonia Citron and Kiki Iriafen. They built out their facility to include more practice and training space and added another night of games to play four nights a week.

The league also grew beyond its single site in Medley, Fla. Unrivaled had a tour stop in Philadelphia that broke the regular-season attendance record for a professional women’s basketball game and earned $2 million in revenue for the league. Buoyed by the success of that event, Unrivaled moved its playoff semifinal round to Brooklyn and sold out Barclays Center (18,261 people) for those two games.

Commissioner Micky Lawler said before the semifinal games that the league was on track to generate $45 million in revenue in its second season after making $27 million in 2025.

“That speaks to the financial performance, but it’s as a natural byproduct of putting the players and the fans first,” Lawler said. “(It’s) proving what’s possible when you focus on the true value-drivers of the sport.”

While Unrivaled had financial successes and increased its social media reach — Lawler said the total player following grew by 52 percent year over year — the second season also brought a significant decline in television ratings. As of the midseason break for the 1-on-1 tournament, ratings were down 31 percent from the first season, when the league averaged 221,000 viewers per game.

Unrivaled moved up its calendar to finish before the FIBA World Cup qualifying tournaments and thus competed with NFL and college football postseason games at the start of its season. The league also lost its NBA lead-in and cross-promotion on TNT, as the NBA moved from Turner Sports to Amazon and NBC in the 2025-26 season.

Unrivaled is on a six-year television deal with Turner Sports that has an opt-out after the 2027 season.

Mist won the 2026 championship after posting the highest point differential during the regular season. They led the league in points and steals per game and capped that effort by shooting 56 percent from the field in the championship, including a perfect 9-for-9 from the foul line. O’Brien was an assistant coach on the New York Liberty staff that won a WNBA title with Stewart in 2024. Now, the pair are champions once more.