Alex Bazzell, the president of Unrivaled Basketball, on the business of women's basketball

Sports Media with Richard Deitsch

Audacy

News, Business News, Sports, Sports News

4.3 • 721 Ratings

🗓️ 2 April 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Episode 492 of the Sports Media Podcast features Alex Bazzell, the president of Unrivaled Basketball. The 3x3 women's basketball league that aired on WBD's networks recently completed its inaugural season. In this podcast, Bazzell discussed the first year of the league and if they met internal aspirations for reach and visibility; averaging 221,000 viewers on TNT and TruTV and how Bazzell evaluated those numbers; the advantages and disadvantages of playing at a centralized location in Miami; Paige Bueckers having equity in the league and what she has said about plans to play for Unrivaled; the prospect of getting great college players down the road including Flau'jae Johnson; how realistic it is for Caitlin Clark to play in the league one day; the relationship with the WNBA; his wife, the WNBA All-Star Napheesa Collier, and her view of the league; having brand name investors such as Giannis Antetokounmpo, Geno Auriemma and JuJu Watkins, and more. You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the sports media podcast. I'm your host, Richard Dutch. My producer's Patrick Antonetti.
0:16.2	One guest on this episode. And if you were interested in women's sports, women's basketball in
0:22.1	particular, and the business of women's basketball, you will find this guest interesting.
0:26.4	Alex Bezell is the president of unrivaled basketball, which has recently completed
0:31.2	its three-on-three women's basketball league. That aired on the WBD's networks. And it's an interesting league because unlike a lot of other
0:40.7	startup leagues, they got a long-term deal with a significant carrier. And that gives you a lot of
0:47.2	runway to work with. Those who are women's basketball fans would know this, but I'll let the
0:53.5	audience know as well.
0:54.3	That league was co-founded by Nefisa Collier and Brianna Stewart. It just concluded its inaugural
0:59.8	season on March 17th, and we will do a recap of this with Alex. Welcome to the sports media
1:06.8	podcast. Thank you. Thanks for having me. You got it. All right. So here's where I want to start.
1:12.8	You know, I'm doing research and hearing the many media places that you've been on.
1:19.0	You were pretty clear in that your aspiration for year one was reach and visibility.
1:24.3	And so let me start here. Do you feel like you succeeded in your mind with those two?
1:29.2	I do. I think, you know, the other thing I always tried to kind of lay the foundation with was
1:35.7	we were never going to go out and do WMBA numbers from day one, right? So success for us looked
1:41.8	really essentially like what we what we accomplished. If we could maintain an
1:47.0	average audience over 200 on our TNT game nights, which we did at 221, and we quite honestly,
1:53.5	we knew this was a hybrid model for return for brands and partners, which was our social media
1:59.2	impact. I think the thing we always could hang our hat on
2:02.7	is as a new league, we didn't deal with a lot of the struggles that most new leagues deal with,
2:08.0	which is, you know, you're trying to find product market fit. Like it may be a popular sport,
	...

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