After a week of action, Unrivaled’s 1-on-1 Tournament came to a close on Friday night, as the semifinals and finals took place in Miami to crown a champion — who would walk away with $200,000.
The final four were Napheesa Collier, Azura Stevens, Arike Ogunbowale, and Aaliyah Edwards, with both Collier (over Stevens) and Edwards (over Ogunbowale) winning their semifinal matchups 11-2 to reach the Best-of-3 Finals. The two traded wins in the first two games to 8, with Edwards winning the opener 9-6 and then Collier evening things up with a 9-4 win to setting up a winner-take-all Game 3.
There, Collier continued to roll as the reigning WNBA DPOY (and MVP runner-up) asserted her will to the tune of an 8-0 win over the young Edwards, fittingly on a turnaround fadeaway from the middle of the floor — a shot she leaned on throughout the tournament on her way to the win.
With that win, Collier earned the crown as the Queen of Unrivaled’s 1-on-1 tournament and lifted the $200,000 check. Collier’s Lunar Owls teammates all took home $10,000 a piece with the win as well, while Edwards won $50,000 for coming in second and Ogunbowale and Stevens took home $25,000 each for making the semis.
While Edwards didn’t win, her performance over the course of the week in which she took down a pair of top seeds in Breanna Stewart and Ogunbowale and pushed another in Collier all the way in the Finals was quite the statement. She had a solid rookie year but was pretty far out of the spotlight in Washington where she wasn’t really a focal point for the Mystics last year, but she showed she has the skills to compete with the absolute best in the WNBA — and the Mystics should perhaps look to feature her diverse on-ball offensive game that she showed in this tournament a bit more.
