Meet the Unrivaled: Rose and Vinyl
Get to know two of the rosters for the star-studded new winter hoops league
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Unrivaled basketball’s first game day is less than two months away, and after Wednesday’s roster reveal we finally know what the six teams look like for the inaugural season in Miami. We’ll take a look at each of the six rosters over the next three days, paired up by their game one matchup. Up first, the Rose and Vinyl.
Rose pairs a Gawd with an Angel
The Rose will presumably roll out a top trio of the “Point Gawd” Chelsea Gray, Angel Reese and Kahleah Copper, combining one of the two 22-year-olds in Unrivaled with a pair of 30-something former WNBA Finals MVPs.
Gray is a three-time WNBA champion with the Las Vegas Aces (2022-23) and Los Angeles Sparks (2016), a six-time WNBA All-Star, and won gold at the last two Olympics for the U.S.
She averaged just 8.6 points (lowest since 2016) and 4.9 assists (lowest since 2017) per game during the 2024 WNBA season after missing the first six weeks recovering from a foot injury suffered during the 2023 Finals. Those numbers jumped to 11.2 ppg and 5.9 apg from September 1 through the Aces’ postseason run.
Copper won the 2021 WNBA title with the Chicago Sky, where she played from 2016-23 before moving to the Phoenix Mercury last offseason.
She earned her fourth straight WNBA All-Star selection, was second in the league with nine 30-point games and averaged a career-high 21.1 ppg in her first campaign with the Mercury.
Copper’s best game of 2024 didn’t come in the W, though, as she lifted the U.S. to the Olympic gold medal with 10 points in the fourth quarter of the dramatic win over France.
Reese is coming off a sensational WNBA rookie season as, ostensibly, Copper’s replacement as the centerpiece and face of the Sky.
She finished second to Caitlin Clark in Rookie of the Year voting and set WNBA records for rebounding average and consecutive double-doubles before her season was cut short by a wrist injury.
Reese also memorably led LSU to a blowout of Clark and Iowa in the 2023 national championship, earning Most Outstanding Player honors at the Final Four.
Filling out the Rose are a player who can reminisce with Copper about the WNBA title they won together (Azurá Stevens), one who can reminisce with Gray about playing under Derek Fisher (Brittney Sykes) and one who can try to convince Reese the right player won WNBA Rookie of the Year (Lexie Hull).
Stevens is coming off her second season with the Sparks after previously playing for the Sky and Dallas Wings in the WNBA.
The 2021 WNBA champion also earned 2018 WNBA All-Rookie honors and was a 2016 First Team All-ACC pick before spending her final season at UConn, making her the only former Huskies player on the Rose.
She averaged 9.6 ppg and a career-high 7.0 rpg for the Sparks last season while hitting 35.0% on a career-high 4.0 attempts a game from deep.
Sykes left LA just in time to miss Stevens, spending the last two years with the Washington Mystics after three with the Sparks. She did, however, overlap with Gray’s final season with Los Angeles in 2020 under the watch of Derek Fisher.
Sykes earned WNBA All-Defense honors four seasons in a row from 2020-23 (First Team in 2021 and 2023). She’s a two-time WNBA steals leader and has 2022 WNBL Defensive Player of the Year honors on her lengthy international track record.
She appeared in only 18 of the Mystics’ 40 games in 2024, averaging 12.2 ppg and less than a steal a game for the first time since 2019. The previous season was her best in the WNBA, with career-highs of 15.9 ppg, 3.8 apg and 2.1 spg.
Hull has spent all three of her WNBA seasons with the Indiana Fever after starring at Stanford in college. She’s never played overseas and doesn’t have quite the list of accolades of most of her teammates, but she does have some experience that is entirely unique on the Rose.
The 2021 NCAA champion and three-time All-Pac-12 selection at Stanford is the only Rose player to have participated in Athletes Unlimited, playing in the 2023 and 2024 seasons.
She averaged a career-high 5.5 ppg in the WNBA in 2024, and posted 7.3 ppg and 4.5 rpg after entering Indiana’s starting five for good in late August.
Love underdogs? Vinyl may be your squad
All six teams in Unrivaled are stocked with highly talented players, as guaranteed by the very premise of a league made up of 36 players plucked from the top of the WNBA. Vinyl feels like the underdog, though, because it is both the youngest and the least decorated of the half-dozen.
Vinyl is the only team in the league with three of six players under the age of 25 as of opening day (soon-to-be 23-year-old Aliyah Boston and 24-year-olds Rae Burrell and Rhyne Howard). They’re also the only team that doesn’t have multiple players in their 30’s (Dearica Hamby is the only 30-something).
This might not have been the case if Arike Ogunbowale hadn’t withdrawn from Olympic consideration, but as it stands every other Unrivaled team has multiple Olympic gold medalists (including 3x3) while Vinyl has none. Each of the other five rosters has at least three total Olympic golds to its name.
Boston and Ogunbowale are clearly the Vinyl’s headliners and make for an extremely formidable inside-outside pair. Ogunbowale’s having a pretty good week for the middle of the offseason. From thanking the lord for her Dallas Wings winning the Paige Bueckers Lottery Sunday to finding out Wednesday she’s gonna play with another of the brightest young stars in the world this winter.
An All-Star for the fourth straight season, Ogunbowale had the second-highest scoring average of her career at 22.2 ppg in 2024. She’s averaged at least 18.7 ppg in all six of her WNBA seasons and is a 35.0% career 3-point shooter on 7.3 attempts a game (34.4% on 8.5 attempts per game over the 2023 and 2024 seasons).
Boston’s gotta be feeling pretty lucky too after finding out that no matter where she goes she gets to play with one of the best combo guards in the world.
The 2023 WNBA Rookie of the Year, a two-time WNBA All-Star in as many seasons and three-time First Team All-American at South Carolina, Boston averaged 14.0 ppg, 8.9 rpg and 3.2 apg in 2024 during her second season with the Fever and first playing alongside Caitlin Clark.
Boston’s numbers climbed to 15.6 ppg and 9.8 rpg from June 13 through the end of the 2024 regular season after the young Fever struggled through a tough and busy early schedule. She had 13 double-doubles in 29 games in that span including one in each of Indiana’s two playoff games.
Jordin Canada slots in naturally as Ogunbowale’s backup, leaving the other three players on the roster (Burrell, Howard and Hamby) to fill out the wing and Boston give Boston a rest.
Canada appeared in 20 games for the Atlanta Dream in 2024 after two seasons with the Sparks and four with the Seattle Storm, with whom she won WNBA titles in 2018 and 2020. She’s reunited here with former Sparks teammates Hamby and Burrell as well as 2024 Dream teammate Howard.
She averaged 10.6 ppg and 5.8 apg in 2024 with the Dream, her fifth time averaging at least five assists a game in the last six seasons and second straight season averaging 10+ ppg after never doing so previously.
Hamby is coming off her 10th and most prolific WNBA season, her second in Los Angeles after a very messy exit from Las Vegas.
The two-time Sixth Player of the Year started all 40 of the Sparks’ games in 2024 and posted 17.3 ppg and 9.2 rpg, beating her previous career-best scoring average by 4.3 per game and her previous career-high rebounding average by 1.6.
A 2022 WNBA champion before her exit from Las Vegas, Hamby also earned this season’s Kim Perrot Sportsmanship Award.
Howard was the No. 1 overall pick in the 2022 WNBA Draft and is coming off her first season without an All-Star selection in three WNBA campaigns.
Howard’s numbers have stayed in a pretty tight range so far in her WNBA career: she’s averaged 16.2, 17.5 and 17.3 ppg in that order on 36.1%, 38.5% and 37.1% from the field, and it goes like that across the board. There are tightly grouped marks averaging out to 17.0 ppg, 4.6 rpg, 3.2 apg and 1.5 spg on 34.2% from deep in her three seasons.
Howard was a four-time First-Team All-SEC selection, two-time SEC Player of the Year at Kentucky and earned WNBA Rookie of the Year honors in 2022.
Burrell is the least decorated player in Unrivaled, but it’s got a lot to do with bad luck. A just world would see her shine in the new league’s spotlight.
She had a breakout 2020-21 season as a junior at Tennessee, scoring 16.8 ppg en route to Second Team All-SEC honors, but a knee injury cost her 12 games early in the season as a senior and slowed her after her return as she dipped to 12.3 ppg.
After that, her rookie season in the WNBA was cut short after just three games in 2022, and she struggled to earn significant minutes since then, not yet playing more than 15.6 minutes per game in a WNBA season (appeared in 66 games the last two seasons with 10 starts).
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