Good morning! Tulsi Gabbard confirmed as director of national intelligence, Macquarie Group is leaving the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, and Unrivaled tries out startup-style basketball.
- Startup season. For the past several weeks, some of the best women's basketball players in the world have been grounded in Miami, with a private chef and an on-site esthetician. That's the standard set by Unrivaled, a new three-on-three women's basketball league that is running during the WNBA off-season.
Star WNBA players Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart cofounded the league, which is led by Collier's husband Alex Bazzell, a WNBA and NBA trainer. The league raised $35 million in funding to get off the ground, with lead investor the Berman family of the credit-card business CardWorks (who have put in a bid for a WNBA franchise in Charlotte). That's more than the league needed to raise, Bazzell says. Around 40% of Unrivaled's revenue this season is coming from sponsorships, with more revenue than the league expected coming from other sources; its biggest sponsorship is with Samsung Galaxy (the WNBA and NBA are sponsored by AT&T). Its games have aired on TNT thanks to a multiyear deal; the first matchup in January drew an average 312,000 viewers, a number that's close to what WNBA games used to get on lower-tier networks before the league's recent surge. Unrivaled itself has 20 full-time staffers, with closer to 60 to 70 people working during the season.
