The Lo-Down: Unrivaled league professional basketball’s newest, best innovation

Women’s professional basketball has ascended to the forefront of sports with an expanding roster of front page stars and endless personality for fans to latch onto. The foundation of Unrivaled, the sport’s newest, most innovative frontier, is proof that there is still so much room for growth to come.

Unrivaled is a new take on professional basketball. Founded by 2024 WNBA MVP finalists Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart, the league features a three-on-three format with six teams filled to the brim with some of the WNBA’s biggest stars.

One of the major contributing reasons to Unrivaled’s creation is the opportunity for players to get paid. The average salary in the WNBA as of 2023 was $147,745, around 12% of the NBA’s minimum salary of $1.16 million. 

With Unrivaled, the league played with an $8 million salary pool for the 2025 season distributed among the league’s 36 players, as well as a $250,000 reward for the winner of the in-season one-on-one tournament. Adding to that, the league’s inaugural roster was awarded a stake in the league, with an “equity pool that will vest over (four years).”

In previous years, WNBA players have turned to overseas competition to earn money during the off-season. One prominent location was Russia, but with the situation that led to current Unrivaled star Brittney Griner’s arrest, a domestic option became necessary. The league’s eight-week span extends from January to March, centered in Miami with about two months between the end and beginning of the surrounding WNBA seasons.

The league’s player-owned persona has also drawn in a long list of brand partners and notable personal investors, among them Alex Morgan, Carmelo Anthony and Steve Nash.

“The investor list is a prominent list, but what we’re most excited about is that these people are active,” Unrivaled President Alex Bazzell said.

Unrivaled’s format is like nothing else in basketball. The three-on-three format combines traditional professional basketball with some pick-up aspects. Each game is played in quarters, with the first three spanning seven minutes while the fourth features an Elam ending. In this ending, both teams compete to reach a target score of 11 points higher than the leading team’s total entering the quarter.

On top of its current success, Unrivaled is already starting to invest in its future. The league has already inked NIL deals with prominent women’s college basketball stars Paige Bueckers and Flau’jae Johnson, with the two expected to make their debuts in 2026, following their WNBA rookie seasons.

Through promoting its players as the leading members of the league’s organization and production, as well as allowing them the opportunity to make top dollar, Unrivaled has presented a fresh, creative take on basketball, building on a landscape that female stars have started to dominate. As the league grows in tenure and popularity, recruiting star players and headlining investors along the way, women’s basketball will only continue to grow in popularity as a product of this new frontier.

Logan Adams is a junior studying journalism. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. Want to talk more about it? Let Logan know by tweeting him @LoganPAdams.