🗽 Layup Lines: Unrivaled in BK

Happy Tuesday and welcome back to Layup Lines. I’ve missed you over the last couple months. Are you staying warm and emotionally solvent? Me neither.

• However, I did have an awesome time at last night’s Unrivaled semifinals. Keep scrolling to read more about Barclays selling out 18,000 seats for 3v3 women’s basketball on a Monday night and an update on the 2026 WNBA season.

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3️⃣🆚3️⃣ Quick semis recap

In its second season, 3v3 league Unrivaled hosted a few games outside of its home stadium in Miami. A January stop in Philadelphia led to the largest-ever crowd at a regular-season women's professional basketball game (21,490 fans) and the energy carried to Brooklyn for last night’s sold-out semifinals.

Game 1: Phantom 83, Vinyl 75

• Kelsey Plum scored a game-high 31 points and the Phantom used the energy and defense of Natasha Cloud and Tiffany Hayes to make life miserable for every Vinyl player outside of Dearica Hamby.

Game 2: Mist 73, Breeze 69

• Breanna Stewart received a standing ovation and the loudest cheers of pregame introductions, but the Mist still came out looking flat and bored. That changed during the fourth quarter, when the Mist took advantage of Unrivaled’s “Elam ending” by going on a 18-7 run to win the game on this incredible Arike Ogunbowale game winner.

🏆 Looking ahead

• The Unrivaled championship game between the Phantom and Mist is back in Miami tomorrow night at 9:30pm ET on TNT.

• Here’s hoping that we can avoid sloppy basketball with another late tip on one day’s rest. Ending Year 2 on a high note would be great for the upstart league.

☄️ Six takes from Barclays

1. I’ve seen intense merch waits at concerts, but the lines for Unrivaled gear last night were the longest I’ve ever seen at a game. It was genuinely hard to move around the concourse at points.

2. Going into the game, I was really curious to see how much of the crowd would be Liberty fans vs. just fans of women’s basketball. Verdict: distinctly the latter. I saw almost every WNBA franchise represented mixed in with a ton of Unrivaled-specific merch — and, to be fair, roughly 5,000 Stew York hats.

3. Another cool scene: The league hosted a pregame for fans at a bar next to Barclays before last night’s first tip at 7:30pm ET. I got there around 6 and the line to get in was wrapped around the block. When it’s 30 degrees in Brooklyn, that’s not nothing.

4. Look, I love what Unrivaled is doing. The talent is there, the salaries are high, the league is hitting impressive revenue numbers and it’s great to put heat on WNBA leadership. But 3v3 basketball is just not as entertaining as 5v5, especially live. Offensive sets are pretty basic, it’s hard to establish rhythm and turnovers almost always lead to points.

5. And as long as I’m here, the second game didn’t tip off until after 9:30pm ET. That’s way too late to start a Monday semifinal game. Next year, let’s get the party started earlier.

6. All that said, the environment was electric and Unrivaled has clearly tapped into something with these road games. UConn grads like Paige Bueckers and Hayes got loud enough cheers that you’d have to think the league goes to college basketball hotspots like the Bay Area, South Carolina or Knoxville next year.

✍️ CBA negotiation update to go

• If the WNBA and WNBA Player’s Association can’t come to an agreement in the next week, we’re headed toward a lockout-shortened season. The two sides have recently sent each other proposals back and forth, but Bueckers told reporters before last night’s game that, "At this point, it's not really a negotiation anymore. Both sides aren't moving.”

  • Catch up with the AP, ESPN and Yahoo.

• Related news: We learned last week that for the first time, the WNBA generated enough revenue in 2025 to trigger revenue sharing with players ($8M to be dispersed). This is a huge win for the WNBPA and gives a lot more context to the current negotiations.

Layup Lines is written 100% by a human being. I very much appreciate you reading and hope you have an excellent rest of the week.

— Everett Cook, Founder & Editor