{"id":433655,"date":"2026-01-27T23:28:24","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T23:28:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/433655\/"},"modified":"2026-01-27T23:28:24","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T23:28:24","slug":"as-project-b-signs-a-list-players-its-a-mystery-no-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/433655\/","title":{"rendered":"As Project B signs A-List players, it\u2019s a mystery no more"},"content":{"rendered":"

The \u201cB\u201d stands for basketball or a bold plan cooked up in a lab — or an abstract combination of both. But the names and the money keep pouring into Project B, the touring basketball league<\/a> that has the potential to become an overseas derivative of the WNBA and Unrivaled all in one.<\/p>\n

With the 2026 W season in limbo for now (as CBA negotiations teeter), Project B has seemingly risen out of the ether at just the opportune time. Dangling reported $2M salaries and equity stakes, the league has signed seven significant WNBA players — Nneka Ogwumike<\/a>, Alyssa Thomas, Jonquel Jones, Jewell Loyd, Kelsey Mitchell, Kamilla Cardoso and Janelle Sala\u00fcn — and, on Tuesday, added the quasi-matinee idol Sophie Cunningham. More should be arriving soon, especially if there\u2019s an upcoming W lockout or strike or shutdown.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of tailwinds,\u201d Project B co-founder & COO Grady Burnett said. \u201cYes, the timing works and businesses do great when you have tailwinds behind you. And fortunately we do.\u201d <\/p>\n

But if you were a fly on the wall 26 months ago — at a dinner with Burnett and his Univ. of Michigan roommate and tennis teammate Geoff Prentice — you would know the depth of thought and capital that makes Project B far more than a whimsical startup. <\/p>\n

\u201cObviously the best weapon that an entrepreneur has is a blank sheet of paper,\u201d Burnett said.<\/p>\n

That dinner was the genesis: two old friends with big-name tech backgrounds and private equity connections brainstorming the next transcendent sports league. It began with two absolutes: That there are roughly 3 billion basketball fans worldwide and about 90% of them are outside the U.S. They decided basketball was internationally undersaturated, and by the time the dinner check arrived, Project B had legs. \u201cJust like Airbnb or Uber or anybody else that sort of saw a supply-demand mismatch, we just said, \u2018Hey, there\u2019s something here,\u2019\u201d Burnett said.<\/p>\n

These weren\u2019t just dreamers, either. Prentice was once the co-founder and chief strategy officer of Skype and later the co-founder and partner of London-based Atomico, a premier venture firm in Europe. Burnett was once the director of online sales and operations at Google and the VP of global sales and operations at Facebook who had since co-founded Bow Capital. But they dropped everything for this.<\/p>\n

The initial funding was from just the two of them, but later friends and acquaintances invested, as well. These weren\u2019t just the usual cohorts. These were people who knew people who knew people, which is how Project B\u2019s institutional knowledge and, ultimately, financing all came down the pike. Burnett said he and Prentice solicited \u201coutside opinions\u201d from the likes of Barry Eggers, the founding partner of Lightspeed Venture Partners; David Krane, the CEO and managing partner of Google Ventures; Laela Sturdy, managing partner at CapitalG; Niklas Zennstr\u00f6m, founding partner and CEO at Atomico; and John Chambers, the former CEO and executive chairman of Cisco.<\/p>\n

All of those five ended up investing, along with Ime Archibong of Meta Platforms, Gaby Sulzberger of Centerbridge Partners and Merline Saintil of Rocket Lab. Throw in institutional investments from Quiet Capital, Mangrove Capital Partners and Sequence Ventures, and the portfolio was becoming prodigious. <\/p>\n

If that wasn\u2019t enough momentum, athlete investors joined in such as tennis\u2019 Sloane Stephens and Novak Djokovic, football\u2019s Steve Young and basketball\u2019s Candace Parker and Josh Childress. \u201cAs an athlete, I know the importance of taking control of your own brand, and Project B gives athletes a platform to do the same,\u201d Stephens said. <\/p>\n

After that the league just needed a basketball mind — and not the rumored Maverick Carter or LeBron James. Instead, Burnett and Prentice recruited four-time WNBA all-star, one-time champion and venture capitalist Alana Beard as a co-founder — and gave her the holistic title of chief basketball officer. The idea was she\u2019d step in and recruit players. <\/p>\n

The preference had been to keep all these machinations under wraps. But with the WNBA collective bargaining negotiations stuck in the mud, the league\u2019s blueprint quickly went public.<\/p>\n

It went like this: The women\u2019s and men\u2019s seasons would run from November through April, starting in 2026. They would stage seven five-game tournaments over a period of two weeks each — likely three in Asia, three in Europe and one in either South or North America — with every event crowning a points champion. The women\u2019s league would have six teams and 66 players, the men\u2019s league TBA. The men and women would play side by side in each city, like tennis does at Wimbledon. <\/p>\n

The names on the front of the jerseys — much like F1 — would be sponsors. The names on the back of the jerseys would be players, who\u2019d all hold equity in the business. There would be a season-ending Super Bowl of sorts. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou need people that can set the tone, set the culture, and set the level of play up here,\u201d Burnett said. \u201cAnd since we\u2019re only doing that across six teams, you can concentrate the talent, not spread it across 13 teams or 30 teams. And as a result, you can have a product that every night is equivalent to a WNBA Final. That\u2019s what we\u2019re setting up.\u201d<\/p>\n

The challenges are undeniable. The women\u2019s league overlaps with the 3-on-3 Unrivaled, which has a similar equity template and already 48 of the best W players locked up. Meanwhile, NBA Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum has said, at some point, the pending NBA Europe<\/a> may start a WNBA Europe in concert with EuroLeague Women, which would make for even more competition and perhaps bidding wars.<\/p>\n

Meantime, the Project B men\u2019s league will go head-to-head against the NBA, an obvious detriment. But Burnett and Co. are undeterred, and — in an overt reference to Unrivaled — Beard has said Project B is \u201cnot a gimmick, it\u2019s five on five. It\u2019s our intent to build out a platform that is hosting the best basketball in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Their gameplan appears to be: Sign every W player not in Unrivaled, particularly a socialite like a Cunningham who has nearly 3M followers between TikTok and Instagram. The league also intends to sign as many as 50% of its players from overseas, foreign stars who can rake in crowds. In China, for instance, the recent signing of former WNBAer Li Meng went viral there. That\u2019s the idea. And for fans who can\u2019t attend games, Burnett is likely to draw up a \u201cfrictionless\u201d media rights platform that will be social, streaming and mobile-centric.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve got a light asset business,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re not building arenas. The vast majority of the money we raise goes to the players. We\u2019ve got new revenue streams in terms of the sponsorships for the teams as well as for the host city fees and a variety of other things. So I want to make sure this is available [digitally].\u201d<\/p>\n

At some point, Burnett said the plan is to even ditch the cryptic code-word \u201cProject B\u201d for a new name that resonates the world over. He provided no hints.<\/p>\n

Perhaps he and Prentice will write it on a napkin at their next dinner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The \u201cB\u201d stands for basketball or a bold plan cooked up in a lab — or an abstract…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":433656,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[402,99,434],"class_list":["post-433655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-basketball","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=433655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433655\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/433656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=433655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}