How a Pair of WNBA Rivals Came Together to Create the Groundbreaking New 33 League Unrivaled

Here’s something you’ve never seen before: two great professional basketball opponents, who less than three months ago slugged it out during an epic WNBA Finals series, now sitting in the same room together to promote their new hoops startup operation.

“Yeah, it got spicy between co-founders for a little bit,” says New York Liberty center Breanna Stewart, who along with her 2024 WNBA Finals rival, Minnesota’s Napheesa Collier, are starting Unrivaled, a three-on-three women’s pro basketball league that tips off Friday night in South Florida.

The pair are conducting a joint Zoom interview with TIME from Unrivaled’s new all-purpose 130,000 sq.-ft. hoops facility outside Miami. The Liberty outlasted the Lynx in a controversial deciding Game 5: with the Lynx a few seconds away from clinching the championship, Stewart appeared to travel before benefiting from a questionable foul call at the end of regulation, allowing her to make two free throws to send the game into overtime, during which New York prevailed to win the franchise’s first-ever WNBA title.

In the postgame press conference, Minnesota coach Cheryl Reeves criticized the refs for allowing New York to play physically throughout the game and series. “This s--t was stolen from us,” she said. A few weeks later, on a podcast hosted by NBA player Paul George, Collier called the refereeing “terrible,” the non-call on Stewart’s foot-shuffling—and the whistle putting her on the foul line—“egregious.” In a GQ interview published in early January, Collier admitted she’s still not over the loss, referring to it as an “injustice.”

So, with the pair now side-by-side on my laptop screen, I had to ask: does Stewart agree with her co-founder’s stance? “What a question,” Stewart says. “Umm, I think it would probably be the heat of the moment. Everyone is feeling all different types of reactions. But one thing that we’ve said is, with all this gained attention in the WNBA, it is going to put a little bit of an extra focal point on the referees. And hopefully that’s something that we can continue to grow and build.”



https://time.com/7207651/stewart-collier-unrivaled-new-womens-three-on-three-basketball-league/