At a time of promise for women’s basketball and peril for Warner Bros. Discovery, a new league with some prominent investors is headed to TNT Sports.
The new 3×3 women’s basketball league “Unrivaled” has reached a multi-year media rights deal with Warner Bros. Discovery to distribute games across TNT, truTV and Max, it was announced Wednesday. Under the deal, TNT will carry doubleheaders on Mondays and Wednesdays and truTV on Saturdays, with all linear coverage simulcast on Max. As games are expected to last one-hour each, a doubleheader will fit into a two-hour window.
The TNT networks have not previously carried women’s professional basketball despite maintaining a relationship with the NBA for the entirety of the WNBA’s existence.
Unrivaled, which is set to debut January 17, is a player-owned venture led by WNBA players Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier that will feature 30 players across six teams. It counts as investors former Turner Sports president David Levy and former ESPN president John Skipper, who oversaw the league’s media rights discussions. Levy’s involvement is particularly notable given his history at Turner, which ended under restructuring by then-parent company AT&T in 2019.
As part of the deal, WBD will acquire an equity stake in the league.
The new venture arrives at a time of marked growth in the popularity of women’s basketball, including record audiences for the collegiate game and the largest audiences in more than two decades for the WNBA. The primary driver of that growth has been Iowa-turned-Fever guard Caitlin Clark, who is not expected to participate in the new league.
Clark is by far the biggest draw in the sport, with her games watched by considerably more viewers than others. Nonetheless, viewership has clearly grown even in her absence — a phenomenon that can be both attributed to the rising tide of her popularity and to a steady, longer-term growth in the visibility of the sport. Whether that will carry over into an entirely new league remains to be seen.
As for Warner Bros. Discovery, Unrivaled is just the latest addition to an eclectic suite of rights that includes French Open tennis, Big East basketball, Mountain West football and a portion of the expanded College Football Playoff, many of which were acquired in the months since it became clear the company had blown its NBA renewal.
The buying spree may point to a strategy by WBD to shift away from the biggest, most expensive properties to a wider range of more affordable niche options, or it may simply point to the reality that all of the top-tier rights are spoken for until the latter half of this decade. Either way, the company continues to signal that it remains a player in the sports media marketplace even without its cornerstone property.
