Unrivaled on TNT Credit: Unrivaled

The long-awaited Unrivaled women’s hoops league will debut Friday night from Miami, with TNT airing the first night of games featuring WNBA stars like Brenna Stewart, Angel Reese, and Arike Ogunbowale.

Given the unique makeup of the league, with a 3-on-3 format, a smaller live crowd, and its independence from the NBA and WNBA, it’s hard to get a clear read on how big the audience could be. At the same time, the two biggest potential draws, Caitlin Clark and A’ja Wilson, are not participating. Executives, including David Levy, the former Turner president who is an investor and advisor for Unrivaled, have stayed conservative when asked publicly about viewership expectations.

Nevertheless, we can pull from a few points of comparison.

The 2017 debut of Ice Cube’s Big3 league introduced the same format and aired on a cable network (FS1). The inaugural broadcast averaged 400,000 viewers. That season, the league’s most famous player was likely Rashard Lewis, a journeyman from the NBA. The presence of Stewart and Reese alone should generate more intrigue for Unrivaled.

Another independent women’s sports league with a unique format, Athletes Unlimited, has struggled to generate an audience with games on ESPN platforms and the WNBA app. Viewership numbers from the U.S. Television Database suggest AU softball struggled to break 100,000 viewers last summer. While ESPN touted growth across 2023 and 2024 for AU lacrosse and softball leagues, the company shuttered its lacrosse league in December.

These, however, are niche sports without anywhere near the exposure or star power of Unrivaled. With games on TNT rather than ESPN2, ESPNU, or ESPN+, Unrivaled will be more front-and-center for fans.

Unrivaled already has a solid brand presence online. The league has more than 135,000 followers on Instagram, nearly double Athletes Unlimited, as well as 43,000 on TikTok. Those aren’t massive numbers, but they are a solid start.

The most useful point of comparison is likely the WNBA. The league’s national games that did not include Clark averaged just shy of 400,000 viewers in 2024, per Sportico. Yet despite Clark’s elimination in the first round of the WNBA playoffs, the league’s Finals averaged 1.57 million viewers.

Momentum is clearly building for women’s basketball. Over 2 million people tuned in for a December college hoops clash between Paige Bueckers’ UConn Huskies and JuJu Watkins’ USC Trojans.

As Unrivaled tips off Friday at 7 p.m. ET on TNT, it seems fair to predict around 300,000 viewers. That would break below the Big3 debut but be in line with non-Clark WNBA games.

The big question is whether Unrivaled, with a long tail leading to its launch after a year-long delay, has done enough to generate awareness. The appetite is there, but without Clark (or Wilson) bringing their fanbases along and the backing of an established league like the WNBA and NBA, clearing that threshold will be a major victory.

About Brendon Kleen

Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.