As Unrivaled embarks on Year 2, co-hosts Jackie Powell and Howard Megdal go deep on the league, its role in the women’s basketball ecosystem and also its future outlook.
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Plus, the duo discussed how Unrivaled is interconnected with the WNBA and its collective bargaining agreement (CBA) amid ongoing negotiations. They go through the experiences of players in WNBPA leadership positions who are balancing competitive basketball with the negotiations, like Kelsey Plum, as well as the impending impact on the middle class of players like Dana Evans, Rachel Banham and Temi Fagbenle.
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Megdal began by giving his one-minute summary of what the league is about, and what he took away from seeing it up close.
“Unrivaled, what does it mean right now? It is many things,” Megdal said. “It is a chance for players to learn and grow. Every player I spoke to has a skill or skills that [they are] working on to bring back into the five-on-five game. It is a place for players to congregate and talk about the ongoing CBA negotiations, and figuring out how they feel about that — not just relative to the league, but relative to one another.
“And it is a place for entertaining, high-level basketball. And it needs to be entertaining enough — for reasons that we’ll get into later in the show — that the ratings sustain the media rights deal that they have, or lead them to another media rights deal down the line. But in the meantime, these are high-level players, playing against the best, having fun while they do it, and caring about the outcome. It’s all of these things.”
Megdal and Powell go on to dig into Unrivaled’s early-season ratings drop compared to 2025, and whether the league can balance its desire to be both a premier television event while also aiding in players’ offseason development.
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