Happy Basketball Wednesday, presented by The BIG EAST Conference. I am delighted that we are mere days away from the Unrivaled visit to Philly, and it comes at a time when the league could use some happier headlines.
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Basketball Wednesday
Purely as a lone measurement, television ratings are a lousy way to determine the long-term viability of anything. That is especially true when the focus is on ratings in Year 1 versus Year 2 of any event. The novelty is going to provide a boost relative to all that followed. (Losing Napheesa Collier, Angel Reese, Sabrina Ionescu and Satou Sabally this season didn’t help, either.)
Accordingly, the reporting about the dip between last year’s Unrivaled opening weekend and this year’s numbers felt undercooked to me. It is a data point, sure, but perhaps due to my own assumptions, it wasn’t any surprise to me. I was more interested in seeing how the data developed over time.
Unfortunately, we’ve heard little about the numbers since. And you can be sure, if the ratings were going up, there’d be plenty of shouting about it by Unrivaled and TNT Sports alike.
The latest numbers from TNT Sports show that viewership has been rising steadily, with Week 3 outpacing Week 2 by 19% for an average of 96,000 viewers. This Monday’s doubleheader averaged 172,000 viewers, which was up 169% over the previous week’s audience. However, the 135K average viewers across TNT and truTV through Week 4 is significantly lower than the 179K this time last year.
Games on TruTV are a lousy way to gauge overall ratings (your parents probably don’t even know what TruTV is!), but the alternatives are down significantly as well.
But regardless of what the numbers are, it is hard to reconcile a steep drop in television viewers with the Unrivaled Philly hype. Xfinity Mobile Arena sold out two weeks ago! There are numerous reasons for this, not least of which was the synergy between the event and things like signage and in-game advertising during 76ers games, along with some of the best women’s sports coverage in America at the Philadelphia Inquirer. (Hi there, Jonathan, Gabriela and company!) This is a tough ticket, like Eagles playoffs-hard. So why the disconnect?
Well, it dovetails with some of the guesses I heard from folks in the women’s basketball world about why these two key indicators are so divergent. Philly is gearing up for an event, but the WNBA is not pushing Unrivaled the way it did last season, given the ongoing collective bargaining agreement talks. It cannot have helped that relationship when Napheesa Collier went public with her anger toward Cathy Engelbert, either — a reminder that at the end of CBA talks, an agreement means the two sides need to work collaboratively.
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Instead, what we’re seeing, it appears to me, is exactly what transpires when the ecosystem that produced both the talent and the window for Unrivaled to excel is decoupled from the larger women’s basketball landscape. There’s a reason Unrivaled has never shied away from talk of a long-term partnership with the WNBA. Its very existence is both chronologically complementary to the WNBA and serves as a two-way effort in brand marketing for women’s basketball. The WNBA’s offseason disappearing problem is solved by Unrivaled, and Unrivaled benefits from a connection to the WNBA (and yes, NBA) ecosphere.
The NBA All-Star Weekend is just two weeks away. We’ve heard nothing about any potential WNBA component to the festivities, not a Sabrina-Steph rematch, not even whether any WNBA players will participate in the Celebrity Game. I’ve expressed my belief that a reimagining of how the WNBA fits into that weekend is overdue. A complete disappearance due to labor strife was not the rebrand I had in mind.
The real fear, if the belief is that positioning Unrivaled the way Collier, Breanna Stewart and Alex Bazzell have is ideal for the future of women’s basketball, is that TNT Sports will be the ones deciding which metric truly matters. For a media rights partner, it is fairly obvious which one is more significant, attendance or TV ratings. With an opt-out after three years in their six-year deal with Unrivaled, this is no small concern.
None of it means that Unrivaled as a concept is failing, or that the women’s basketball boom has crested. Similarly, it will be fascinating to see what the audience numbers look like for Athletes Unlimited, which will not only be on ESPN, but the WNBA app as well. Similarly, the relative lack of early adopters for the just-released WNBA schedule, given widespread doubts about whether the season will take place in precisely the way the schedule says it will, only further dampens the women’s basketball 2026 outlook in entirely self-created ways.
It all suggests that we’re seeing a decoupling between the appetite to see the best women’s basketball in the world and how easily and consistently people watch it for the first time since, really, pre-pandemic days. And it serves as a useful reminder that labor peace won’t just harness the energy I’m expecting to feel at Friday night’s festivities — it ensures that a collaborative effort exists to keep that momentum moving forward.
This week in women’s basketball
Fantastic from Ari Chambers on Cotie McMahon.
Always great Mitchell Northam on Aaliyah Chavez.
Diane Richardson is a critical part of the Philly women’s basketball push.
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Speaking of Philly…
Five at The IX: Dawn Staley, South Carolina
(If you watched Sunday’s win over Vanderbilt and it didn’t convince you the Gamecocks are a legit threat to win it all, go watch it again)
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