Copyright The Hollywood Reporter
Women’s basketball league Unrivaled is expanding in its second season — both in its number of teams and its TV footprint. The 3-on-3 league, co-founded by WNBA stars Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart, is adding a fourth night of games on TNT Sports for the coming season, which tips off Jan. 5. The league is also expanding to eight teams, up from six for its inaugural season earlier this year. Games will air on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday throughout the eight-week season; TNT, TruTV and HBO Max will have the Friday and Monday contests, and Saturday and Sunday games will run on TruTV and HBO Max. The additional night — last season didn’t have games on Sundays — allows Unrivaled to eliminate back-to-back games for its players. In the coming season, four teams will play on Friday and Sunday each week, and the other four will play on Saturday and Monday. One of the things that I think our players credit us with the most is actually listening to them, and we want to keep them as healthy as humanly possible — not for not just for our league, but for the [WNBA] as well,” Unrivaled chief content officer John Learning told The Hollywood Reporter. “So when they did come to us and say that they would like us to consider ways to find some some some more [breaks in the schedule], it’s what our basketball ops team focused on probably more than anything in the offseason.” TNT Sports’ Unrivaled telecasts will look somewhat different this season. Learning and TNT Sports executive vp and chief content officer Craig Barry told THR that the league’s purpose-built arena in Miami will feature more fans in the primary camera shots (last season, those shots were mostly of a large video wall) and bringing some more of TNT Sports’ long history televising basketball into the mix. “We’re making a significantly larger contribution to the overall production presentation, because we want parity across all of our sports properties,” Barry told THR. “Not that it wasn’t good before — it just had room to grow and evolve.” The changes to the arena setup are part of that, Barry noted: “The interesting thing about a small venue — especially a venue like that, where you have control of [the layout], the energy really is part of the primary driver of the presentation of the event. If you’ve been to that venue, the live energy is totally different while you’re there. The conversations that we’ve had [have focused on] the translation of that energy — we need to see it and feel it more through the screen.” Unrivaled games averaged 221,000 viewers for TNT and TruTV simulcasts last season — a fraction of NBA or WNBA games on cable but a solid start for an entirely new league with a significantly different format (3-on-3 vs. 5-on-5) from other basketball leagues. Barry said the audience on TNT skewed about 60 percent female, significantly higher than for other women’s sports across linear TV. “They’re finding their own audience, and they have a voice,” Barry said. “People are liking this product, and they’re going to find this league. That’s very reassuring when you’re creating something and looking for success.” Unrivaled played all of its games in the 850-seat arena built for the league (and for TV production) last season, but it will on the road for one night in the coming season. On Jan. 30, two games (Breeze vs. Phantom and Rose vs. Lunar Owls) will take place at Philadelphia’s Xfinity Mobile Arena, home of the NBA’s 76ers. “I think it will be fascinating to see what this looks like in a giant arena,” said Learning. Learning also said staying with TNT Sports for season two of Unrivaled was a “no-brainer” for the league. “We always wanted to stay. It made the most sense,” he said. “We’re a brand new league. We’re entering our second season, and I just think that we wanted to uncomplicate the search for our content as much as possible. And we already had the best partner we could imagine.”
