There has been some good basketball on display at Unrivaled’s Wayfair Arena in Miami, and hoops fans or women’s basketball fans got a taste of the present vs the future in the championship round of the league’s first one on one tournament between Minnesota Lynx forward Napheesa Collier and Washington Mystics forward Aaliyah Edwards on Valentine’s Day.
According to The Athletic, Collier, the WNBA’s reigning Defensive Player of the Year, has largely used the league to announce her intentions on challenging the Las Vegas Aces’ A’ja Wilson as the best player in the world; she is averaging 29 points and 11.5 boards as the best player on the Lunar Owls.
Collier, one of the league’s co-founders alongside the New York Liberty’s Breanna Stewart, who plays for the Mist Basketball Club, took another step in Wilson’s direction when she gave Edwards, who just came off a good rookie season, an education in why nobody likes guarding “Queen Phee” as Hall-of-Famer Lisa Leslie often calls her on the league’s broadcasts.
Unlike the rest of the tournament, which was a rather high-stakes single elimination bracket, the championship round was a best of three series, and although Edwards took the first game 9-6, Collier showed her championship level experience and took the next two games 9-4 and 8-0 respectively behind her patented defensive intensity and impeccable footwork, both on the drive and in the post.
Edwards completed a Cinderella run through the tournament, knocking off Stewart in the first round, blanking her 12-0 before going on to beat Allisha Gray, another player considered to be one of the favorites to win the tournament, and then dispatching Arike Ogunbowale, a shifty guard whose game was made for one on one basketball, and finally, defeating Azura Stevens for the right to face Collier for all the marbles.
In all, Edwards made herself $75,000 during the course of the tournament, while Collier made $275,000 plus earning her teammates an extra $10,000 apiece because she won; both players prizes represent a significant windfall, in Edwards case, it is more than the $73,439 she earned as the sixth pick in the WNBA draft, and in Collier’s case it exceeds the WNBA’s Supermax which is currently capped at $249,244.
This kind of player empowerment is a reason why the league was started in the first place, tabbed from the very beginning as a league built by basketball players for basketball people, as Unrivaled’s president of basketball operations, Luke Cooper, told ESPN in January.
“Everything was built for the players. The business was built for the players, the facility was built for the players, and the actual game — the 3-on-3 full court is rooted in how you would play basketball as a kid,” Cooper said.
The other piece of it is helping WNBA players comply with the WNBA’s prioritization rule, which penalizes players who play overseas if they’re not back with their teams by May 19, in some cases in the middle of their overseas clubs’ seasons.
As Edwards told The Athletic, that piece of it was a factor in her decision to take part in the league, but she wasn’t really concerned with the financial implications of her tournament play.
“It’s kind of crazy. I didn’t think about it (the prize winnings) like that,” Edwards said. “But I think that Unrivaled is a great space for athletes, especially young athletes like myself, to capitalize on making money here in North America and providing for our families.”
Collier, meanwhile, believes the league, and the one on one tournament aspect of it specifically, could change the course of the culture for women’s hoops, particularly as it relates to seeing young female hoopers playing one on one in the playground.
“We’re trying to really change the culture of women’s basketball,” Collier told The Athletic. “You go to the playground or the park and you see guys playing pickup or they’re playing 1s, you don’t see that with women a lot, and we’re really trying to change that, just what it means to be a female athlete and the culture of playing in your backyard, playing at the park, playing 1s, like we’re doing. We’re not seeing that a lot and so we’re trying to change that.”
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