WNBA stars Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier made a historic announcement with massive implications for the prominent women’s basketball league.
Stewart and Collier, who both starred at UConn, informed ESPN that they intend to found a new 3-on-3 women’s professional basketball league. The league’s creation is in direct response to the lack of options WNBA players have domestically in the off-season, on top of other things. It would also provide for a great opportunity in the U.S. for women’s basketball players.
“BREAKING: Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier told ESPN they are founding a new 3-on-3 women’s pro league to give the top WNBA players an option to play domestically in the offseason,” the ESPN Women’s Hoops account announced on Twitter.
Ramona Shelburne wrote on ESPN, “The new league, called Unrivaled, would run from January through March and feature 30 of the top professional women’s players on six teams, playing games of 3-on-3 and one-on-one at a soundstage in Miami.”
Shelburne continued: “The goal is to raise enough in private funding and sponsorships to provide the players commensurate pay with what they make during the WNBA season. That would help offset the lucrative contracts they’d be giving up overseas because of new league rules requiring players to return from international commitments by the start of WNBA training camps.”
Collier and Stewart told Shelburne and ESPN that they created the idea one night when they went to dinner in New York with Collier’s husband. Stewart has reportedly reached out and tried making deals with business partners, and already, Shelburne reports that the two basketball stars “assembled a team of business and sports industry leaders from companies such as Twitter, DAZN, the WTA and WWE to help launch the league next January.”
About Chris Novak
Chris Novak has been talking and writing about sports ever since he can remember. Previously, Novak wrote for and managed sites in the SB Nation network for nearly a decade from 2013-2022