On Friday, Unrivaled, a new 3-on-3 women’s basketball league, made its debut. To attract players, it offers the highest average salary in women’s team sports, as well as first-class facilities on par with the National Basketball Association’s. For fans, the league plays a fast-paced, free-flowing version of basketball that empowers players to show off their skills.
It’s a winning combination, and Unrivaled should inspire positive changes in the WNBA and women’s sports in general. But it’s not just women’s sports leagues that should be paying attention. The NBA should watch, too. As it deals with flagging viewership, the men’s league can learn a thing or two from Unrivaled that will help it keep and grow an audience.
It’s an awkward and unexpected position for the world’s most popular basketball league, but something has to be done. Even after the NBA enjoyed some very good news over the summer, when it signed new media rights agreements worth $76 billion over 11 years, there was still the nagging question of what to do about its ratings slump.
From late October to mid-December of the 2024-25 season, average viewership declined 19% across the league’s national media partners. Following a holiday bump, it’s sliding again in 2025.
In part, the slippage reflects the ongoing migration away from cable television, which is affecting other sports and programming. Yet it would be naive for the NBA to simply sit back and wait for viewers to move over to Amazon Prime, its new streaming partner, when it begins showing games in the fall.
For one thing, younger fans who have abandoned cable (or never subscribed in the first place) aren’t showing the same interest as older fans in watching two-hour-plus games interrupted by ads, replay reviews (more ads), and final-two-minute sequences that can last for 10 minutes (punctuated by more ads). Their fandom is often fed by watching game highlights and the lifestyle content generated by their favorite athletes on social media. But it’s not just the young fans who are looking away from sports television. Years of data suggest that spectators who still like watching televised sports are doing it with distracting second screens in hand (I’m guilty).
Unrivaled wasn’t formed to save sports television. Rather, it was established to give WNBA players a way to earn money playing in the U.S. during the lengthy WNBA off-season. Without such an option, most players have ventured overseas to earn money, despite injury and other health and safety risks.
But the league’s savvy choices and approach offer potential solutions to the malaise faced by basketball and other televised sports. It’s no accident that Unrivaled’s founders — WNBA All-Stars Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart — chose to form a 3-on-3 league. Reflecting its streetball origins, the style of play is fast-paced and free-flowing, emphasizing versatility and individual skills that perform well on social media. In recent years, it has attracted a young, digital-first audience, especially outside of the U.S. In 2021 it made its Olympic debut, and at Paris 2024 the sport enjoyed sellout crowds.
Unrivaled plays a modified version of the traditional 3-on-3 game on a shorter full court that utilizes two baskets. There are also 18-second shot clocks, three seven-minute quarters and an untimed fourth during which teams aim for a target score. The rules are intended to dissuade end-of-game fouls, keep the pace up, and ensure games fit into one-hour broadcast windows. Meanwhile, the full court — minus the extra defenders — provides players the room to create offense and the kinds of highlights that excite social media.
It’s still early, but the willingness to experiment and break the rules to provide audiences with something new, fast-paced, and social media-friendly will serve the league well. Next month Unrivaled is holding a 1-on-1 tournament in which the best players in the world go head-to-head for $250,000. As a television-watching, middle-aged hoops fan, I can’t wait; my guess is that younger digital-first fans will be just as excited.
The NBA should take the hint. A faster-paced game tuned to the new realities of sports television is key to its current and future success. To be fair, the league has tinkered around the edges in recent years. In 2018, for example, it shortened the shot clock to 14 seconds after certain plays in order to speed up the game (and it’s worked). More recently, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver signaled openness to shortening the time taken during replay reviews.
Unrivaled is a reminder that he can — and should — do more. He can start with a serious look at shorter shot clocks to further speed up game flow and limit, not expand, the use of replay. The NBA should also seriously consider emulating Unrivaled by eliminating second free throws in favor of a single shot that varies in value depending on the type of foul. Doing so would improve a matchup’s pace, especially during the fourth quarter, which is, for many fans, the most interesting part of the game.
Finally, the league should look to adopt a 3-on-3 tournament of its own. Perhaps replacing the mid-season Emirates NBA Cup is the place to start. In its second year, it failed to generate a notable increase in viewership. An alternative format highlighting individual skills would create intense interest among longtime and newer fans, and the league should watch Unrivaled’s 1-on-1 tournament for tips on how to make it work.
The NBA has a long history of adopting ideas from competing leagues. The three-point shot, the slam dunk contest, and the drafting of college underclassmen were all ideas pioneered in the 1960s and '70s by the upstart American Basketball Association. It’s time for the league to do it again, and Unrivaled is the rival providing the playbook.
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