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Unrivaled women’s basketball league announces 2 expansion teams, 18 roster spots

The WNBA is not the only professional women’s basketball league going through a period of expansion.

On Wednesday, Unrivaled, the professional 3×3 basketball league that paid the highest salaries in American women’s team sports history in its debut season, announced that it will be adding two new teams and 18 additional roster spots to the league for its second season.

When the second season begins in January 2026, Unrivaled will debut Hive Basketball Club and Breeze Basketball Club, each of which will have six players. It will also create a season-long development pool of six players, who are not assigned to a specific team at the start of the season, but are present on-site and serve as injury relief players.

Unrivaled president Alex Bazzell said the league previously thought it would expand after its third season. “But we’re just so far ahead of schedule that there’s no reason for us to sit there and wait,” he said. “We want to be a home for as many great players as possible without diluting the product.”

As a result of the expansion, Unrivaled will also be expanding the number of nights its games are broadcast. Last season, Unrivaled primarily aired on Fridays, Saturdays and Mondays. While the league is still finalizing which night games will air, the additional game day allows the league to eliminate back-to-back games.

Bazzell said it should also help with player recovery after a record WNBA 44-game regular season and in the middle of Unrivaled’s season. Teams will still play two games per week.

Almost all of the players who participated in Unrivaled’s first season are returning for Year 2. Thirty players are signed on two-year contracts that run through 2027, Bazzell said. Fifteen are signed to three-year contracts.

Dallas Wings star Paige Bueckers will be one of its newcomers after signing a three-year deal with the league in April. Bazzell said that there is no “current dialogue taking place right now” with Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark, though he added, “everyone knows that we want the best players. Everyone knows that if they’re interested, we always have spots.”

Earlier this week, Unrivaled announced that it raised capital from a group of investors at a $340 million valuation. While Bazzell declined to share the total size of the shares sold in the league’s raise, Unrivaled said its current valuation has increased 10 times from its valuation in May 2024, when it first received funding.

Unrivaled played the entirety of its inaugural season outside of Miami. This season, it will play games off-site, as it plans to announce a tour stop location within the next month.

The league is still finalizing the details of how it will split up its expanded rosters.

“Our job is to make sure that these teams are spread out fairly, but we don’t lose the core identities of some of these fan bases that have built up,” Bazzell said. “That’s going to be the balancing act.”

(Top photo of Breeze Basketball Club logo courtesy of Unrivaled)

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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