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With Unrivaled’s opening weekend come and gone, the new winter 3×3 professional league co-founded by WNBA stars Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart averaged 313,000 viewers in its opening game between Stewart’s Mist Basketball Club and Collier’s Lunar Owls Basketball Club, TNT Sports said Tuesday. The league said viewership peaked at 364,000 viewers during its first game.
Unrivaled’s second game Friday between Rhyne Howard’s Vinyl Basketball Club and Chelsea Gray’s Rose Basketball Club averaged 311,000 viewers. Both are the most-watched women’s basketball games ever to air on TNT Sports, the parties said. And according to Sports Media Watch, the opening games outpaced last year’s average WNBA regular-season game on cable by 50 percent, excluding games involving Caitlin Clark (who is not playing in Unrivaled).
Collier and Stewart founded the league in the hope that it will become a viable alternative for WNBA players’ overseas offseasons. Throughout the weekend, participants gushed about the league’s emphasis on player experience.
After signing a six-year agreement worth $100 million with Warner Bros. Discovery this fall, TNT and TruTV will broadcast Unrivaled games throughout the season, while Max will offer streaming. Games will air on TNT on Friday and Monday nights, and TruTV will air Saturday games. WBD also invested in the league.
Heading into the opening weekend, Unrivaled officials stressed that TV ratings were only one data point they were looking for regarding fan engagement.
“It’s not fully indicative of what is the overall fan interest because there’s so many ways to consume leagues and teams and highlights,” league president Alex Bazzell told The Athletic prior to the league’s launch.
David Levy, an Unrivaled investor who is the former head of Turner Sports and current co-CEO of Horizon Sports and Entertainment, pointed to other metrics he’s looking at.
“How many people are following (on social media)? What are they doing? How many people are sharing? How much is the fan base interacting with it? How much is merchandise going up? There are going to be so many different metrics that I think are going to play into this,” Levy said.
Regarding social media reach, Unrivaled said its content from its first weekend across all Bleacher Report platforms delivered 31 million views and that its content on Bleacher Report’s B/R W Sports TikTok (formerly named HighlightHer) had 59 percent more views than the platform’s average TikTok posts this month. Having widespread social media reach was an appeal of the WBD partnership, league executives told The Athletic.
Unrivaled features 36 of the top players in the WNBA, with 22 All-Stars participating in the debut season. It has promised to pay the highest average salary in women’s professional sports history. Players are paid an average salary of more than $200,000 for the 10-week season and those involved this year also received equity in the league.
The second week of play begins Friday at 7:15 p.m. ET.
What do the initial ratings mean for the new league?
When it comes to a new pro sports league with an over-the-air or cable component, the usual rule of thumb among sports television executives is to see what the viewership numbers are when the season is around the halfway point. That’s a true indicator. You usually get a big pop for your debut, the numbers go down in Week 2, and then we ultimately find out where the league sits.
To me, these viewership numbers are neither earth-shattering nor neither disastrous. TNT highlighting that these are the two most-watched women’s basketball games ever on TNT Sports platforms is nice for them but it’s a little like being the fastest runner in Liechtenstein — TNT does not exactly have a long history of women’s basketball content.
I think an interesting comparison are the 2022 and 2023 WNBA regular seasons, the pre-Caitlin Clark era. The WNBA averaged 372,000 viewers in 2022 over 25 games across Disney networks, a 20 percent spike versus 2021. They then jumped to an average viewership of 505,000 viewers across ABC, ESPN and CBS for the 2023 WNBA regular season.
To me, if you are Unrivaled, you’d like to land at an average of 300,000 viewers or more this year and build on what has been great reviews. Then try very hard to add Clark for 2026. — Richard Deitsch, media reporter
Required reading
(Photo: Jim Rassol / Imagn Images)
