The returning Skylar Diggins is looking forward to what the second season of Unrivaled holds with both the Lunar Owls and beyond.
Skylar Diggins sees herself as an “upperclassman” on the Unrivaled campus…but don’t expect any senior skip days from the Lunar Owls BC star.
With over a decade of professional experience under her belt, the 35-year-old Diggins is one of the more seasoned stars of Unrivaled, the domestic 3×3 league set to embark on its second South Beach outing. Working that long at the professional level is hardly the luck of the (Fighting) Irish, and Diggins appreciated that Unrivaled lived up to its namesake and allowed her to earn a continued residence.
“If you’re not competitive against this group, you know, they’ll show your [butt] up,” Diggins said as the Lunar Owls flew south for the winter. “I think that everybody here has a body of work that deserves to be respected, that earns the right to be respected. I think the biggest compliment I can give is competing as hard as I can. I think that establishes the environment on the floor, what it’s going to be, especially when you play against our team.
“We know last year we had become a bit of the hunted, as far as how we approached the game. I take myself very seriously in these spaces, and so, yes, it’s no secret that I love the competition, and it’s what fuels me, but I also look forward to the caliber of players that I’m around. I truly believe that it is an iron sharpens iron mentality, not only for the players that are on my team, but also who we’re facing. [They] demand a certain level of competition and provide a certain level of attitude and swag that you have to bring to the table to be able to compete, and not only to compete, but to win.”
Working with league co-founder Napheesa Collier, Diggins earned Second Team honors to close out the league’s maiden voyage. She averaged 18 points and a team-best 4.8 assists in a nearly perfect regular season for the Lunar Owls, who bring in Rebecca Allen, Rachel Banham, Aaliyah Edwards, and Marina Mabrey in the quest for playoff redemption.
2025 All-Unrivaled Teams
1st Team
Napheesa Collier
25.7 PTS, 10.6 REB
Chelsea Gray
21.3 PTS, 5.4 AST, 6 GW
Kayla McBride
22.2 PTS, 2.8 AST2nd Team
Skylar Diggins-Smith
17.9 PTS, 4.8 AST, 5 GW
Rhyne Howard
29.5 PTS, 1.3 STL
Angel Reese
13.1 PTS, 12.1 REB pic.twitter.com/5bz4EuDDFQ— Ballislife.com (@Ballislife) March 13, 2025
The compact court of Unrivaled paid Diggins dividends in the eventual WNBA season: in her second season with both the Seattle Storm and back from a year off from maternity leave, Diggins’ 3-point percentage increased nearly 10 points from the prior campaign, and she earned the first triple-double in her WNBA career. The competitive nature of Unrivaled, which favors the aggressive, appeared to help her prepare for an evolving W.
“The three periods of seven minutes, and then a target score, your approach—you really can win any game,” Diggins noted of the narrow nature of Unrivaled’s scoreboards, where victors are determined by a target score in an untimed final period. “Some teams get tight when they’re up going into the target score, and they do things, they play not to win, almost, or not to lose rather…but the aggressors win in this game.
“You have to go, and you have to go have a fast start. You get to halftime fast, and then after that third period, you’re right into the target score,” Diggins continued. “Those are a lot of the nuances that we’ll talk through as a team and strategize with the new makeup of our team. It’ll be a lot more this year. This is only the second season, so we only have one season of sample size to kind of compare to. But that’s the excitement about it. Anybody can win, so that’s great for the audience.”
Diggins on the Upcoming WNBA CBA
Excitement, for better and worse, also lingers off the court: Diggins, like many of her contemporaries, is keeping herself abreast of the WNBA collective bargaining agreement discussions that dominate the current women’s basketball landscape. With Christmas coming, the workshop is a relatively dormant period, as the latest development was the league’s players association giving its high table the go-ahead to strike “when necessary.”
That’s, ironically enough, an area where the debut season of Unrivaled can assist Diggins and her fellow floor fighters.
Last winter’s first go-around assembled some of the game’s brightest stars, which certainly made for an interesting session of WNBA free agency. But the opening of a trail to a revamped CBA, Diggins revealed, was laid out amidst the good-natured gossip, and she knows that the discussion will emerge in full force this time around.
“We definitely took advantage last year here in Unrivaled…We took advantage of the opportunity, trying to be proactive, talking about what this year could potentially look like, the CBA, some of our goals, and get opinions of everybody as far as the hierarchy,” Diggins explained. “We’re going to do the same thing. We’re definitely going to organize like we always do. Obviously, it’s best that, you know, it’s best when we can have a lot of us in the same room, see each other’s facial expression, bounce ideas off each other, and just have that support system and that space to be comfortable and share.”
Skylar Diggins tonight
• 26 points
• 7 assists
• 3 rebounds
• 2 steals
• 8/18 FG— Women’s Hoops Network (@WomensHoops_USA) June 8, 2025
Paving the Way for the Next Generation
Set to enter her 13th year of WNBA play (“God willing”), Diggins has left her mark on the progress the league has made to date. That experience, she admitted, ensures that she won’t be able to reap the full benefits the next CBA will offer. But fighting for the next generation is a perfectly acceptable replacement award in her eyes, making Unrivaled a chance to hone her game both on the floor and in the boardroom.
“I think that we haven’t heard what we want to hear yet. I know that for sure,” Diggins acknowledged. “We’re still fighting for what we want. We still want to be heard and taken seriously. We can’t do an expansion draft without a CBA. We can’t do qualifying offers without a CBA, and we can’t talk about this growth that we’ve been lining up for years and years and years and setting up for [more] without getting these negotiations done.”
“We’re fighting for each other. For me, I won’t be in the league for the entirety of this CBA. It’s not for me, but I’m thinking about my daughter, having a league to play in one day, and these younger players that are still going to be in this league when I’m gone. That’s the mentality and my approach.”
Geoff Magliocchetti is on X, @GeoffJMags
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