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New York Liberty star Breanna Stewart and the Minnesota Lynx’s Napheesa Collier are linking up to pull off something similar. Still, it’ll instead be a 3-on-3 league for the ladies dubbed Unrivaled.
If you learned anything from the steadily rising interest in the WNBA, you’re aware that the base WNBA salaries are around $64,000, and one of the newly formed league’s goals is to ensure that the women who take part are paid a fair wage.
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“It’s really important to us,” Collier told
the Associated Press. “Compensation is a huge part of Unrivaled as a league and a business. All the players in this first year will have equity in the league. For players to have a piece of the pie essentially to grow their generational wealth is something we’re really excited about.”
With abysmal salaries and a season only lasting 40 games, WNBA players have notoriously been forced to supplement their income by playing overseas. The most troubling case of overseas play came with Brittany Griner, who went to Russia in February 2022 as a member of the UMMC Ekaterinburg basketball club but was detained for months before the Biden administration negotiated her release while serving a nine-year sentence.
But with this new venture, Stewart wants to change that narrative and even give players a chance to ink more brand deals to showcase their power and pocket more money they’d never see in the W.
“It’s amazing, not only for the salaries to be similar or more than your WNBA salary, but to build brand partnerships that can’t come into the W or the NBA,” Stewart said. “It’s more than just an initial salary, but showing these companies who you are as a player.”
So far, we know that the league will last for eight weeks and consist of 30 players divided into six teams. The teams will stay the same the entire time, playing two games a week on a court two-thirds the size of a regulation one. The games will still last four quarters but shorter than the league’s typical 40 minutes.
The league’s inaugural season begins in January, and the initial 30 players will also receive equity in their respective teams.
Other investors include NBA All-Star Carmelo Anthony, women’s national soccer team captain Alex Morgan, former ESPN president John Skipper and more.
Below, see how social media is reacting to some of the WNBA’s most talented stars creating another stream of income for their co-workers.
