The new 3-on-3 women’s basketball league Unrivaled announced an exclusive multiyear media deal with TNT Sports on Wednesday.
Games will air three nights a week on TNT Sports platforms: Mondays and Fridays on TNT and Saturdays on truTV. All of the games will be streamed on Max, which also falls under the Warner Bros. Discovery umbrella. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The deal gives the upstart league a prominent media partner while helping TNT Sports strengthen its portfolio as it hurdles toward the likely end of its deal with the NBA. The network has recently added college football and basketball, the French Open, NASCAR, and golf. The Unrivaled league is set to run from January to March, in the thick of the NBA season, which will bode well for the network in the winter of 2026 if or when it loses the NBA.
Several specifics of the league came along with the announcement. Action will tip off Jan. 17, 2025, and the regular season will feature more than 45 prime-time games. Unrivaled has announced 26 of its 30 players for this year’s league—as well as UConn guard Paige Bueckers for the following year—which will be divided onto six teams. Players will compete on a compressed full-size court. The league was founded by Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier, who are battling against each other in the WNBA Finals this week.
Unrivaled places a big focus on player earnings and giving each of its players a stake in the league. TNT Sports says it’s investing an “undisclosed amount” in the league, too.
“We have an obligation to the players to build the most highly competitive product we can and the best business we can because they’re all owners in this business,” Unrivaled president Alex Bazzell tells Front Office Sports. “Having the freedom to just go out to the open market freely and figure out who the best partner for us would be was everything for us.”
Bazzell—Collier’s husband—credits Luis Silberwasser, the CEO of TNT Sports, for believing in the league “right away.”
The negotiations were led on Unrivaled’s side by two heavy hitters in the sports media world: David Levy, the co-CEO of the marketing agency Horizon Sports & Experiences and former president of Turner, and John Skipper, TV exec and former president of ESPN. Levy and Skipper are both already investors in Unrivaled.
“I’ve been in this business a while. It was nice to see the demand for this product, meaning the amount of suitors that were looking and kicking the tires on it,” Levy tells FOS.
The announcement also mentioned TNT Sports will show Unrivaled highlights and content on its other platforms like Bleacher Report, House of Highlights, and HighlightHER. With 30 of the best women’s basketball players in the world together in Miami for nine weeks, the off-the-court content opportunities are “substantial,” Levy says.
The WNBA, which Bazzell says has been “extremely supportive” of Unrivaled, signed a $2.2 billion media-rights deal this year with ESPN, NBC, and Amazon Prime that will start in the 2026 season and total $200 million annually. Those distributors all agreed to discuss the deal in several years to determine if it was undervalued.
“That $200 million includes the top 30 WNBA players, and you just carve the best of the best out, I’m not saying we got $200 million, but imagine that that’s a starting point knowing exactly what we just got paid for the same quality of product that’s out there in the marketplace,” Levy says.
While the NBA struck its next media-rights deal without WBD, the company is still fighting to keep games past this season. TNT’s parent company is suing the NBA, with the league earlier this month asking a judge to throw the case out. WBD argued in late September that the league put “purposely onerous or immaterial” provisions into its contract with Amazon that would’ve made it impossible for TNT to match.
