Napheesa Collier Talks the “Injustice” of the WNBA Finals and Launching Her Own Women’s Basketball League

There’s plenty of opportunity for Unrivaled to mine during the ongoing women’s sports boom, of course, as proven by the league’s broadcast partnerships with TNT and Max. But Collier’s biggest motivation for launching Unrivaled is to simply allow WNBA players the chance to stay closer to home during the winters—as the mother of a two-year-old daughter, Mila, she’s hoping to eliminate the logistical nightmares that come with trying to raise a kid halfway around the world, or uprooting a child’s life to temporarily move them to a new country.

“The time changes, the different schools, the figuring out childcare, it’s a lot,” she explains. “That was definitely a huge thing for me. Being able to have my family is my number one priority in life.” Collier says Mila is still a bit too young to really take a liking to basketball just yet, but she’s starting to grasp that her mother plays it for a living. “When I put my uniform on, she’s like, ‘You can go play basketball.’ So she says that, but then she gets upset when I leave.”

No matter how the first year shakes out—and Collier acknowledges that, as with any new endeavor, the first year of Unrivaled will have some natural hiccups—the arrow is pointing in the right direction for women’s sports. And with Unrivaled, the future of women’s basketball, specifically, is no longer fully reliant on the WNBA as the only professional league in America. Unrivaled is already set up well for the future too, with much-ballyhooed collegiate point guard Paige Bueckers set to join once her days at UConn are over.

“I’m excited the sport is growing,” Collier beams, before getting into some theories about why 2024 finally brought the breakthrough moment. “I feel like people didn’t know about us. It was so hard. How can you expect a casual fan, someone who is new to the sport, to hunt on Facebook for a game? It’s not like we were easily accessible where you could just turn the TV on. And now that we are, you see more people coming in, and that’s what we’ve been saying for years. Just give us the opportunity to be seen, and people will watch. I think that’s what you’re seeing.”