The 3-on-3 league Unrivaled will hold its championship game on Wednesday night with cofounder Breanna Stewart's Mist squad facing Kelsey Plum's Phantom BC team.
After playing a thrilling pair of semifinals on the road in New York in front of a star-studded sellout crowd at Barclays Center, the title game for the 3-on-3 league will be back at its home base in Miami. Stewart said the league thought about having the championship game at Barclays Center too,
but decided it was better to keep it at the 1,000-seat home arena.
“There’s a (value) to going and winning a championship in the place that you built,” Stewart said. “So while it is a smaller arena and venue, that’s where the banner is raised, that’s where the Rose has it, and now we’re going to fight for that championship in the place that we’ve been working all season long.”
Neither Phantom nor Mist made the playoffs last season when Rose BC won the inaugural championship.
The game will be on TNT, truTV and HBO Max with a 9:30 p.m. EST tip off. The winning team will receive $600,000 to split among its players.
Unrivaled is a 3-on-3 full-court league that plays 7-minute quarters for the first three periods. Then winner is decided by whichever team reaches a target score first in the final quarter. That number is determined by adding 11 points to the score of the team that's leading after three quarters. In Monday night's semifinal games, a target score of 82 was needed in the game between Phantom and Vinyl. In the nightcap, 73 was the score needed to win the game between Mist and Breeze.
Top-seeded Phantom BC is led by Plum, who had 31 points in the semifinal win over Vinyl. The team was playing without the league's Defensive Player of the Year, Aliyah Boston, who was ruled out for the semifinals and championship game with a lower extremity injury. The team was assigned Aziaha James and Makayla Timpson for the last two rounds of the playoffs with Boston out as well as Dana Evans. Phantom played the whole season without star forward Satou Sabally, who suffered an injury during the WNBA Finals last October.
Plum is joined by Natasha Cloud, Kiki Iriafen and Tiffany Hayes.
The second-seeded Mist are led by Stewart, Allisha Gray and Arike Ogunbowale. Mist rallied from a 10-point fourth-quarter deficit to beat Breeze in the semifinals as Ogunbowale knocked down a corner 3 to end the game.
Alanna Smith and Veronica Burton are the other key contributors for Mist.
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AP WNBA: https://apnews.com/hub/wnba-basketball
