Napheesa Collier Talks the “Injustice” of the WNBA Finals and Launching Her Own Women’s Basketball League

Napheesa Collier is ready to talk about the WNBA Finals. Specifically, she’s ready to talk about the officiating that she—and her Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve, who said “that shit was stolen from us” following the Lynx’s Game 5 loss to the New York Liberty—feels is partly responsible for her not having a championship ring around her finger.

“I’m definitely still not over it,” Collier plainly states. Sitting in a conference room at the GQ offices, wearing a stylish head-to-toe denim ensemble, the 28-year-old tells me that her frustration with the league’s referees goes far beyond the last game of the past season. “This specific situation just feels different for me because I feel like it was…I don't know if avoidable is the right word, but we've been complaining about refereeing for the entire year. It just feels so preventable,” she says. “The entire series was horrible. The entire season was horrible.” What was the main emotion she experienced in the aftermath of the loss? “Anger. I would just say, like, injustice. I don’t know what that feeling is.”

If you’re one of the few sports fans who didn’t watch the WNBA Finals—the five games from the series averaged a record 1.57 million viewers—just know that New York superstar Breanna Stewart shot 31 free throws during the series to Collier’s 14. Many of those calls came in key moments: Stewart landed at the free-throw line at the end of Game 1, tying things up and forcing overtime—the Lynx did eventually prevail, but in their view, the game should've already been over. It happened again to close the deciding Game 5: With less than six seconds left, a foul was called on Lynx forward Alanna Smith as Stewart clumsily crashed to the basket.

That late call against Smith kept the Liberty alive in a way that few outside of New York felt great about. (Even LeBron James weighed in on Twitter: “I’m sorry but that wasn’t a foul!”) The Libs eventually pulled away in overtime to capture the chip, which Collier admits she’ll be thinking about, in some capacity, forever. “It’s something you’ll never get over,” she said. “That’s what sports is. It evokes really extreme emotions from you. Even if we win another championship, that’s how you get over something, but you’ll still be like, Oh, man. The one that got away.”

Collier and Reeve showed (and voiced) plenty of frustration with the officials during the WNBA Finals Elsa/Getty Images

The Finals should have been a culmination of a tremendous, career-defining year for Collier, one that still saw her cement herself as one of the top dogs in women’s hoops. In addition to her regular-season accomplishments—winning the Defensive Player of the Year award, making her fourth All-Star team, and finishing second to A’ja Wilson in MVP voting—Collier also grabbed her second Olympic gold medal as part of the USA women’s basketball team in Paris. After the strangeness of the COVID-delayed, fanless Games in 2021, Collier’s time in Paris was a wildly new experience. “I felt like it was also a cultural moment, not just a sports thing,” she says “I mean, Snoop Dogg was the face of the Olympics!”

Now, on the heels of both her Parisian triumph and star-making WNBA season, Collier is gearing up for another big milestone. In the summer of 2023, Collier co-launched Unrivaled, a forthcoming three-on-three basketball league that will give WNBA players the opportunity to remain in the US during the offseason—as opposed to decamping for teams in Europe, where they often receive far greater salaries than they do domestically. The league begins play on January 17, and does not lack in star power. In addition to Collier, household names like Stewart (the other cofounder), Angel Reese, Sabrina Ionescu, and Brittney Griner are all in the mix as well. The entire inaugural season will take place in Miami, with plans to hold games across the country in 2026. Among the other early investors are retired USWNT soccer stars Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe, tech giant Gary Vaynerchuk, former ESPN president John Skipper, and actor Ashton Kutcher.

While Collier—known to those closest to her as “Phee”—intends to focus mainly on the basketball side of Unrivaled, her husband, Alex Bazzell, oversees the business operations as the league’s president. Naturally, some of the trade has seeped into Collier’s brain via osmosis. “He’s the one that really deals with the business side, but now I know what a Series A is,” she laughs.

There’s plenty of opportunity for Unrivaled to mine during the ongoing women’s sports boom, of course, as proven by the league’s broadcast partnerships with TNT and Max. But Collier’s biggest motivation for launching Unrivaled is to simply allow WNBA players the chance to stay closer to home during the winters—as the mother of a two-year-old daughter, Mila, she’s hoping to eliminate the logistical nightmares that come with trying to raise a kid halfway around the world, or uprooting a child’s life to temporarily move them to a new country.

“The time changes, the different schools, the figuring out childcare, it's a lot,” she explains. “That was definitely a huge thing for me. Being able to have my family is my number one priority in life.” Collier says Mila is still a bit too young to really take a liking to basketball just yet, but she’s starting to grasp that her mother plays it for a living. “When I put my uniform on, she's like, ‘You can go play basketball.’ So she says that, but then she gets upset when I leave.”

No matter how the first year shakes out—and Collier acknowledges that, as with any new endeavor, the first year of Unrivaled will have some natural hiccups—the arrow is pointing in the right direction for women’s sports. And with Unrivaled, the future of women’s basketball, specifically, is no longer fully reliant on the WNBA as the only professional league in America. Unrivaled is already set up well for the future too, with much-ballyhooed collegiate point guard Paige Bueckers set to join once her days at UConn are over.

“I'm excited the sport is growing,” Collier beams, before getting into some theories about why 2024 finally brought the breakthrough moment. “I feel like people didn't know about us. It was so hard. How can you expect a casual fan, someone who is new to the sport, to hunt on Facebook for a game? It's not like we were easily accessible where you could just turn the TV on. And now that we are, you see more people coming in, and that's what we've been saying for years. Just give us the opportunity to be seen, and people will watch. I think that's what you're seeing.”