Opening weekend of the next WNBA season will feature the biggest individual rivalry in women’s basketball as Caitlin Clark and the Fever open against Angel Reese and the Sky.
The Fever will host the Sky on the opening Saturday of the WNBA season May 17, the league announced as part of its 2025 schedule release. The matchup is set to air at 1 PM ET leading into a WNBA semifinal rematch between the Aces and Liberty at 3 PM, with both games presumably airing as part of an ABC doubleheader. (The WNBA will release TV designations at a later date.)
Clark and Reese — who have been deemed rivals ever since their matchup in the 2023 NCAA women’s basketball national championship — met five times in 2024, once in the NCAA Elite Eight and then four times in the WNBA. While Clark moves the needle in and of herself, attracting blockbuster audiences against just about any opponent, her games against Reese were particularly strong draws.
The Elite Eight game was, at the time, the most-watched women’s college basketball telecast on record with more than 12 million viewers on ESPN (surpassed by Iowa’s subsequent national semifinal and championship). Their professional matchups came nowhere close to that level of viewership, averaging 1.9 million across ESPN, CBS and ION, but still accounted for the two largest WNBA regular season audiences since 2001 (2.30 and 2.25 million on back-to-back weekends in June).
Clark and Reese are set to meet again on June 7 and July 26 — also Saturdays — before a final matchup on Friday, September 5, that will air on ION (which has rights to all Friday WNBA regular season games).
The season gets underway Friday, May 16, with a three-game line-up that will include the Dallas Wings — owner of the league’s #1 draft pick — and expansion Golden State Valkyries. The Friday night start is a return to what had been the norm after last season began on a Tuesday.
The coming WNBA season is the last of the current media rights deal with ESPN, CBS, ION and Amazon Prime Video. The WNBA is included as part of the NBA media rights deal with ESPN, NBC and Amazon that begins in the fall of 2025, and the league is also expected to negotiate its own separate renewals with CBS and ION.
