They put a hoop on the tour bus after all.
Unrivaled commissioner Micky Lawler sat down with Storied Sports to take us behind the planning for this season, when eight events will be held outside of the league’s Miami event space. After a Jan. 30 sellout at Xfinity Mobile Arena in Philadelphia with 21,490 fans, and another at Barclays Center, even Lawler, who has been deliberate about managing the league's growth, couldn't ignore what the crowds were telling her.
Unrivaled was ready to hit the road.
She was egged on by co-founder and CEO Alex Bazzell. “It was clear that we needed to remodel,” she said.
Unrivaled is in growth mode. This summer the league, which has played most of its games in a 1,000-seat facility in Miami, was valued at $650 million. But the tour is becoming a much bigger feature this year, with six more cities on its schedule: Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Detroit, Houston and Minneapolis.
The backstory of how the league got here is fascinating. Three months before the Philadelphia game, Lawler underwent spine surgery. Her doctor told her to stay home and a few months off. But with a massive snowstorm approaching and Unrivaled preparing for its biggest event yet, sitting on the sidelines wasn't exactly an option.
“I thought, oh, man, you've just presented me with two big problems,” Lawler said. “Number one, I've been working since the day I got home from the hospital, and number two, the storm. We can't have a storm. We're going to Philly in a week!”
Lawler had a cadre of passionate Philadelphians ready to show up: Wanda Sykes, Dawn Staley, Natasha Cloud and Connor Barwin, and Jason and Kylie Kelce. The crowd went wild when they were shown on screen — especially Cloud, who addressed the crowd after she played.
“I had tears in my eyes from the emotion of, oh, my God, this is really fantastic,” Lawler said. “I remember we all lost our voices. We were exhausted. We, you know, had two hours of sleep a night for that whole week. But it came together just so beautifully. And what I realized then was, you know, we cannot underestimate the effect that COVID had on humanity, and this was no matter rain, ice, snow, or Armageddon. People had a chance to come together in a really happy place, surrounded by positivity.”
Connection. That is what Unrivaled is about. This isn’t the WNBA. It’s 3-on-3 basketball to start, a quicker, looser game.
While Unrivaled's television audience has yet to match the enthusiasm of its live crowds, the league has clearly tapped into something powerful. The next challenge is translating that in-arena energy and sense of community into a broader audience and a sustainable business.
And there is so much to build on. When you aren’t limited to one place, you can go anywhere, and that includes other countries with a strong interest in basketball. But there’s one big caveat before anyone is booking the charter flights.
“We do have very close communications with players,” she said. “So their feedback rules the day. We are going to talk about how they would feel about going abroad in season four.”
And this is where being a young, nimble league can allow Unrivaled to take risks that the WNBA just can’t. Lawler has a few business challenges, like getting ratings up to boost the revenue picture and deliver for broadcast partners TNT and Warner Brothers, but most of the problems are logistical: how can Unrivaled keep up with surging demand?
“We're not tied down by any legacy rules or ways of doing things, and so we can work with a fresh canvas, and that's what we have done,” she said.
