For as long as I can remember, NBA fans have been wishing for a 1-on-1 tournament at All-Star Weekend. Seeing the best players in the world go head-to-head has felt like a pipe dream though, as there has never been any indication it’s been seriously considered — even as the league has seemingly tried everything to shake up the All-Star format.
Among the biggest reasons we’ve never seen it is star players not wanting to get embarrassed, as a 1-on-1 game (which are usually short) creates the opportunity to get absolutely dusted. If a player goes cold at the wrong time or runs up on someone who is hot and just can’t miss, you can get run off the floor quickly. That could, in theory, be detrimental to their brand, which is apparently too much to put at stake.
And yet, in the first year of its existence, Unrivaled got a bunch of the best women’s basketball players on the planet to sign up for their 1-on-1 tournament. It’s the format basketball fans have been begging to see, and on Monday, the first round delivered a very fun opening night of action — even with some injury withdrawals that shortened the first round to just 8 games.
The games are quick — playing make-it-take-it and scoring by 2’s and 3’s with a target score of 11 can go very fast — and guards and bigs were all thrown into the bracket together, with fan-voting determining the seeding, which created some fascinating matchups. The format seems to benefit guards, as having to take the ball out past the three-point line with a 7-second shot clock doesn’t give bigs a ton of time to go to work on the block. That said, bigs who have a face-up game were able to leverage their size advantage and get some wins as well. The games being to 11 (meaning 5 buckets was enough to win if you hit a couple threes) kept the tension high and led to some shocking upsets, most notably Breanna Stewart getting blanked by Aaliyah Edwards, 12-0.
That part — a major star getting worked by a young up-and-comer — is particularly important because it is the situation that so many players are terrified of, but it’s also great for the game. Stewie took it on the chin and congratulated Edwards (her Unrivaled teammate on the Mist), and it was a star-making performance for Edwards, who spent last year toiling away in relative obscurity on the Washington Mystics as a rookie, where she was not even the focal point on her own team. This gave her a stage to show her complete skillset, and she took full advantage, putting Stewie in the blender on offense and putting the clamps on defensively.
It will take a lot more than a 12-0 loss in a 1-on-1 tournament to put a dent in Stewart’s legacy. She just won another championship with the Liberty and her place among one of the all-time greats is cemented, and while there is some chatter wondering if she’s lost a step, she’ll have a chance to answer that in due time as she and the Liberty go for a repeat campaign in 2025. For Edwards though, that performance against a great is enough to put her on the radar of fans who might not have been all that familiar with her game. The sixth overall pick from last year’s draft certainly isn’t an unknown having starred at UConn, but she was also definitely not the most-discussed player from her rookie class and had an up-and-down campaign in Washington. Beating Breanna Stewart, and doing so in dominant fashion, is the kind of thing that draws broader attention.
This is the real value of a 1-on-1 tournament for the sport as a whole, as it provides a unique stage for players who may play various roles to show different skills. Being great at 1-on-1 requires a different skillset than being great at 5-on-5 (or 3-on-3, in Unrivaled’s case), but it’s also the form of basketball everyone is familiar with and everyone understands. There’s no off-ball action or sets being drawn up, it is just self-creation and survival. That lends itself to entertainment, and Unrivaled has steered into that. Everyone plays 1-on-1, and with a $200,000 prize for the winner, there are enough stakes to add some juice to the proceedings.
As the second round gets set to begin (Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. ET on truTV), we should see even more intensity as we inch closer to that prize money. The seven second round games (Edwards will get a bye after Marina Mabrey and Kate Martin were both scratches from the first round) feature some extremely fun matchups like Arike Ogunbowale vs. Skylar Diggins-Smith and Courtney Williams vs. Rhyne Howard and presents further opportunity for young players to make a statement, most notably Rickea Jackson who will go toe-to-toe with the league’s top dog, Napheesa Collier.
In Year 2, I could see some adjustments being made to the tournament format, perhaps extending games to 15 instead of 11 to give more of an opportunity for runs on both sides, but the first year already feels like a success from the outside after one round. Hopefully the players enjoy it as well and we continue to get buy-in, because it gives fans something they’ve been asking to see for a long time. Perhaps eventually players in other leagues will follow suit and sign up for some 1-on-1 once they see a loss isn’t the end of the world, but in the meantime, it helps Unrivaled stand out and gives players a stage to show their full skillset as playmakers.
