MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The new Unrivaled women's basketball 3-on-3 league will have its games broadcast on TNT and its sports platforms.
The league announced a multiyear partnership with the network to show more than 45 games from the inaugural season that begins in January. Matchups will be shown three nights a week with twice-weekly games on TNT on Mondays and Fridays. Games that are played on Saturday will be shown on truTV.
Games begin on Jan. 17 and will be played in Miami.
“Our TNT Sports portfolio centers on premium live sports and our media and equity partnership with Unrivaled deepens our commitment to further expanding the depth of top tier women’s sports programming we offer our fans and presents an opportunity for us to shape and amplify the continued growth of women’s basketball,” said Luis Silberwasser, chairman and CEO of TNT Sports.
The league features 30 of the top women's basketball players across six teams and was co-founded by Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart.
“I mean, to be able to have a network like that that supports us, especially in Year 1, I think is just a huge testament to women's basketball right now and how much it's growing,” Collier told The Associated Press at shootaround before Game 3 of the WNBA Finals on Thursday.
Having all the games on one platform was huge for the new league. The league was also having discussions with ESPN, Amazon, ION and the CW.
“We had a lot of interest as you could imagine and you know, we thought about carving this up in certain ways, but to give credit to Luis and the vision that he had, he wanted it all,” said former Turner President David Levy, who is the co-founder and co-CEO of Horizon Sports & Experiences and helped secure the media rights deal. “He thought it was smart for the league. And we talked about it, and we ended up deciding that maybe it is right to go with one entity, and a strong entity.”
TNT will have a studio show at least one of the two nights it's showing games.
“Being on TNT, you know, for two of the three nights is really important, not just to help grow this league, but also to the women who play in it,” said Levy. “You know, they they grew up watching TNT. And then let’s not forget Bleacher Report and House of Highlights. That’s where all the Gen Z'ers are.”
Unrivaled President Alex Bazzell said that being on TV was received really well by the players.
“I think there’s a lot of nostalgia that goes along with this for the athletes," he said. “We have an obligation with whichever partner it is that it’s someone they’re proud of and I think that first and foremost they're really proud of this partnership. I've gotten tons of texts that our athletes are pumped up.”
Salaries for the new league will be in the six figures. Compensation was key for players, many of whom have spent their offseason overseas supplementing their WNBA incomes. The average WNBA base salary is about $130,000 with the top stars able to earn more than $500,000 through salary, marketing agreements, an in-season tournament and bonuses. Many of the players also will have an equity stake in the league.
The league will run for eight weeks with the 30 players divided into six teams. The squads will play two games a week with the contests taking place on a court about two-thirds the size of a WNBA one. The teams will stay the same throughout the season.
AP WNBA: https://apnews.com/hub/wnba-basketball
New York Liberty's Breanna Stewart (30) shoots during the first half in Game 2 of a WNBA basketball final playoff series against the Minnesota Lynx, Sunday, Oct. 13, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Pamela Smith)
New York Liberty's Jonquel Jones, left, attempts to score against Minnesota Lynx's Napheesa Collier (24) during the first half in Game 1 of a WNBA basketball final playoff series, Thursday, Oct. 10, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Pamela Smith)
NEW YORK (AP) — RTX Corporation, the defense contractor formerly known as Raytheon, agreed Wednesday to pay $950 million to resolve allegations that it defrauded the government and paid bribes to secure business with Qatar.
The company entered into deferred prosecution agreements in separate cases in federal court in Brooklyn and Massachusetts, agreed to hire independent monitors to oversee compliance with anti-corruption and anti-fraud laws and must show good conduct for three years.
The money the company owes includes penalties in the criminal cases, as well as civil fines, restitution and the return of profits it derived from inflated Defense Department billing and business derived from alleged bribes paid to a high-ranking Qatari military official from 2012 to 2016.
The amount includes a $428 million settlement for lying to the government about its labor and material costs to justify costlier no-bid contracts and drive the company's profits higher. The company was also accused of double-billing the government on a weapons maintenance contract.
It also includes nearly $400 million in criminal penalties in the Brooklyn case, involving the alleged bribes, and in the Massachusetts case, in which the company was accused of inflating its costs by $111 million for missile systems from 2011 to 2013 and the operation of a radar surveillance system in 2017.
It also agreed to pay a $52.5 million civil penalty to resolve a parallel Securities and Exchange Commission investigation and must forfeit at least $66 million to satisfy both probes.
At a brief hearing in federal court in Brooklyn, lawyers for RTX waived their right to an indictment and pleaded not guilty to charges that the company violated the anti-bribery provision of the Foreign Corruption Practices Act and the Arms Export Control Act. They did not object to any of the allegations in court documents filed in conjunction with the agreement.
RTX said in a statement that it is “taking responsibility for the misconduct that occurred” and is “committed to maintaining a world-class compliance program, following global laws, regulations and internal policies, while upholding integrity and serving our customers in an ethical matter.”
A message seeking comment was left for the Qatari embassy in Washington.
RTX said in a July regulatory filing that it set aside $1.24 billion to resolve pending legal and regulatory matters. The company's president and CEO, Christopher Calio, told investors that the investigations largely involved issues that predated the Raytheon-United Technologies merger that formed the current company in 2020.
“These matters primarily arose out of legacy Raytheon Company and Rockwell Collins prior to the merger and acquisition of these companies,” Calio said. “We’ve already taken robust corrective actions to address the legacy gaps that led to these issues.”
According to court documents, Raytheon employees and agents offered and paid bribes to a high-ranking Qatari military official to gain an advantage in obtaining lucrative business deals with the Qatar Emiri Air Force and Qatar Armed Forces.
The company then succeeded in securing four additions to an existing contract with the Gulf Cooperation Council — a regional union of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — and a $510 million sole-sourced contract to build a joint-operations center for the Qatari military, the court documents said.
Raytheon made about $36.7 million in profit from the Gulf Cooperation Council contract additions and anticipated making more than $72 million on the joint operations center, but the Qatari government ultimately did not go forward with the deal, prosecutors said.
In the price inflation case, Raytheon allegedly lied to the government about the costs it would incur in building three Patriot missile firing units — also known as missile batteries — leading the U.S. Army to agree to a $619 million contract.
In a 2013 email cited in court papers, a Raytheon employee told a Pentagon official that the company's expected costs had increased when, according to prosecutors, they had actually gone down. Prosecutors said the government overpaid for the weapons by about $100 million.
Raytheon was also accused of misleading the U.S. Air Force in 2017 about the costs associated with operating and maintaining a radar surveillance system, including by arguing that it needed to give employees lucrative compensation packages to maintain adequate staffing.
In reality, prosecutors wrote in court papers, the company “was secretly preparing to reduce the pay” of site employees “in order to improve the company’s profitability.”
The contract was fraudulently inflated by $11 million, prosecutors said.
Wednesday's penalties are just the latest legal fallout from RTX's business dealings.
In August, the company agreed to pay $200 million to the State Department after voluntarily disclosing more than two dozen alleged violations of the Arms Export Control Act and International Traffic in Arms Regulations.
Among the allegations were that the company provided classified military aircraft data to China and that employees took company-issued laptops containing information about missiles and aircraft into Iran, Lebanon and Russia.
FILE - The sky is reflected on the facade of Raytheon's Integrated Defense Systems facility, Monday, June 10, 2019, in Woburn, Mass. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola, File)
