After much anticipation, Unrivaled Basketball League has unveiled its six official 3x3 teams. The new women’s professional basketball league, co-founded by Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart will include 30 WNBA stars divided into six teams.
Unrivaled Basketball League unveils six official club names
Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart’s newest women’s professional 3x3 basketball league has announced its club names.
Photo by David Dow/NBAE via Getty Images
Noa Dalzell is a senior writer covering the WNBA and all of women’s basketball for Breakaway, SB Nation’s women’s sports vertical, as well as the Celtics for CelticsBlog.
The club names are as follows:
- Laces Basketball Club
- Mist Basketball Club
- Phantom Basketball Club
- Lunar Owls Basketball Club
- Rose Basketball Club
- Vinyl Basketball Club
“With no city affiliations to tie to, we had to ground our league to what makes women’s basketball so special: the community,” Unrivaled Basketball said in an official video. “In the world’s biggest sport — soccer — football clubs have come to represent unity and community around the game, a single crest that unifies players and fans that have been there since the beginning. In professional basketball leagues, clubs don’t exist yet, but we’re changing that.”
Unrivaled Basketball has been rolling out promotional material and social media accounts for each of the six clubs.
The league has already announced 26 of its 30 participating players, with two of the four remaining players expected to be rookies. The current list of participating players includes rookies Angel Reese and Rickea Jackson and Olympians Chelsea Gray, Kahleah Copper, Kelsey Plum, Jackie Young, Rhyne Howard, Dearica Hamby, Satou Sabally, and Jewell Loyd. There are up-and-coming young players like DiJonai Carrington, as well as more established veterans like Brittney Griner, Tiffany Hayes and Skylar Diggins-Smith.
As it currently stands, notable omissions include Caitlin Clark, A’ja Wilson, Sabrina Ionescu, and Alyssa Thomas.
How players will be divided up into teams remains to be seen; the only thing that is certain is that Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart won’t be teammates, as Collier has previously confirmed.
The league is set to tip-off on January 17th on TNT, with games slated to take place on Mondays and Fridays for a span of 8 weeks, including playoffs. In February, Unrivaled will also feature a single-elimination 1v1 tournament in order to determine the best 1v1 player in the world.
