For professional athletes, WNBA players do not make all that much money. For instance, Bueckers’s year-one salary as the number one pick will start at just under $79,000; the highest paid players in the WNBA each will earn around $249,000 in 2025. Compare that with the NBA, where the number one pick in the draft will earn a base salary of around $15.6 million next year, and the highest-paid player—Steph Curry—earned almost $56 million this year. This pay disparity between the leagues makes some sense, as the WNBA generates significantly less revenue than the NBA. But, as Los Angeles Sparks star and first vice president of the players association Kelsey Plum has said—and players have repeatedly affirmed—“We’re not asking to get paid what the men get paid. We’re asking to get paid the same percentage of revenue shared.” This is the real disparity. Under the NBA’s current agreement, players receive up to 51 percent of all revenue generated by the league. In the WNBA, players receive 50 percent of what’s called incremental revenue, or revenue earned by the league after exceeding league-defined targets that themselves grow substantially every year. The result is that, in 2025, players will receive just around 20 percent of league revenue. That, among other things, is what the players association is trying to change.
So, when Collier and Stewart launched Unrivaled this past January, it was both a showcase of the league’s deep roster of electric talent and a declaration of worth. The league’s first season was designed largely as a TV spectacle. All games were played in a single, 850-seat arena in Miami; aired exclusively on Fridays, Saturdays, and Mondays; broadcast on TNT and TruTV; and streamed live on the Max app. And they were an absolute blast. Three on three is a loose, intimate style of basketball—the kind of playground ball we rarely get to see high-level star athletes play—and, for that reason, it’s an incredible theater for observing the personalities of its players. Viewing close-up as defenders lock into a stance or scorers go on a heater, we learn how to watch the game, who these people are, what they are like.
One of the great advantages of the small scale of Unrivaled was the opportunity for viewers to close-read players’ faces, gestures, even social relationships. Like seeing a band at a small club show rather than in a giant arena, the league offered a different kind of access. Unrivaled’s signature event, in fact, was a leaguewide one-on-one tournament. Napheesa Collier won it.