The Ladies’s Basketball Corridor of Fame Alana Beard throughout The Ladies’s Basketball Corridor of Fame 2025 Inductions media occasion on the WBHOF June 13, 2025, in Knoxville, Tenn. (Shawn Millsaps/ Particular to Information Sentinel) The worldwide basketball league that features a number of high-profile athletes as traders doesn’t have an official title however is about to launch subsequent fall, Entrance Workplace Sports activities reported on Wednesday.
Headed by former Fb govt Grady Burnett and Skype co-founder Geoff Prentice, the league will embody 5-on-5 males’s and ladies’s leagues, however Maverick Carter — Los Angeles Lakers famous person LeBron James’ longtime enterprise accomplice — will now not be concerned, per the report. Based on FOS, the venture stays on observe.
“This group got here to Maverick for session, which he gave, and he subsequently stepped away months in the past,” a spokesperson for Carter informed FOD. “He’s now not working with them or some other basketball league in Europe.”
FOS reported in July {that a} assembly on a ship in France involving James, Carter and Misko Raznatovic, the agent for Denver Nuggets famous person Nikola Jokic, was in regards to the unnamed league generally known as “Undertaking B.”
Requested to remark by FOS on Tuesday, Raznatovic wouldn’t say if he was concerned within the venture.
Alana Beard, a four-time WNBA All Star and a 2016 WNBA champion with the Los Angeles Sparks, is among the many present and former athletes invested within the venture. A 2025 Ladies’s Basketball Corridor of Fame inductee, Beard is the league’s co-founder and chief basketball officer.
“I’ve all the time had my thoughts set on possession,” Beard informed FOS.
Together with Beard, fellow former NBA stars Candace Parker and Lauren Jackson are additionally invested, together with former NFL quarterback Steve Younger and tennis stars Novak Djokovic and Sloane Stephens. Funding corporations Mangrove Capital, Quiet Capital and Sequence Fairness have additionally offered monetary backing.
With the primary season set to start subsequent fall and run by way of April, the Undertaking B league could be up in opposition to the NBA calendar, however not going the WNBA, which begins its season in the summertime.
“To the extent they’re trying to do one thing aggressive, I’ve stayed away,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver mentioned final month on the FOS Tuned In summit in New York.
Along with North America, the league has tournaments deliberate for Asia, Europe and Latin America.
“We’re paying multiples larger than is out there proper now on the planet of ladies’s sports activities,” Burnett informed FOS. “We’re paying the very best salaries and fairness packages in girls’s workforce sports activities, and this might be among the finest gamers on the planet. We would like this to be unimaginable basketball.”
Who will play within the league has but to be revealed, however a spokesperson mentioned the commitments they’ve secured embody an unnamed WNBA participant and “among the sport’s most revered athletes.”
–Subject Stage Media
