PHILADELPHIA — Natasha Cloud had a chance Friday night to script a Hollywood ending to Unrivaled Basketball’s trip to the Xfinity Mobile Arena. Instead, she penned a Philadelphia finish.
Cloud brought the ball up the court, her Phantom team leading by one point, two shy of the target score against the Breeze. Cloud’s driving floater rimmed out. With it went the script-writers’ dream.
Instead, Cloud cleaned up the miss, diving to bat the ball to teammate Aliyah Boston. Cloud was on the seat of her pants, having slid back over halfcourt, when Boston fed Kelsey Plum for the game-winning finger roll, the Phantom claiming a 71-68 decision in the first game of the 3-on-3 league’s doubleheader.
Whatever the score, there was little doubt of Cloud coming out of Friday feeling like a winner. The Cardinal O’Hara All-Delco and Saint Joseph’s graduate played her first game in Philadelphia since 2015. Packing the home of the 76ers were 21,490 fans, a facility record for any event, including concerts around the compressed 3-on-3 court, and the record attendance for a professional women’s basketball event in the United States.
It brought tears to the eyes of Cloud, who pregame recounted memories of watching the 76ers play at what was then the Wachovia Center while growing up in Broomall. In the first women’s professional basketball game in the city since the folding of the WNBA’s Philadelphia Rage in 1998, the rapturous response ensured it won’t be that long until the city’s next chance.
“It’s everything,” Cloud said through tears. “This is my city. I love this city so much. I’m looking around seeing my jersey, seeing signs. Man, I love this city.”
Cloud didn’t have a game to remember on the court, shooting 0-for-5 from the field with two points, four assists and two rebounds. She was the only Phantom player not to reach double figures, with Plum (22 points) and Boston (18 points) leading the way over the Breeze, powered by Paige Bueckers and Rickea Jackson.
But that was beside the point for Cloud and the 30-some friends and family she had in attendance at Unrivaled’s first game in a home market. And for the many more wearing her jerseys or signs that easily converted the usual Cloud 9 branding to her Phantom number 15. And for the thousands that proved, with a WNBA expansion team on the horizon in 2030, just how deep the untapped market of Philadelphia is for women’s sports in a city that sold out its record allotment weeks ahead of time.
Cloud wasn’t the only local interest. You didn’t need an alert for when she or North Philly native Kahleah Copper, in the Game 2, checked in thanks to the pop of applause. Copper fared better, shooting 6-for-14 for 19 points. Her Rose squad, though, was on the wrong side of an 85-75 decision to the Lunar Owls.
The dream local day was reserved for Belmar native Marina Mabrey, the Manasquan grad who tossed in 27 points on 10-for-13 shooting in an all-time heater of a seven-minute first quarter for the Lunar Owls. The last two triples, in transition in a hectic final minute of the frame, sent the crowd to its feet with a roar they would’ve heard on the far side of the river.
She finished with an Unrivaled scoring record of 47 points on 18-for-28 shooting and a league record 10 3-pointers. That included the clinching points in the fourth. (Dearica Hamby of Vinyl, one of the four teams not traveling to Philly for this set of games, scored 40 this month.)
Mabrey pointed to a conversation with coach DJ Sackmann about how the players wanted to remember the moment years from now.
“We’re going to look back and say that we were the first to play in Philly, when Unrivaled traveled here and stuff,” she said. “So to take it in and soak it in. I took that as time to go crazy.”
The crowd included celebrities like Robin Roberts and Leslie Jones. It featured a handful of 76ers, including Cardinal Dougherty grad Kyle Lowry and center Andre Drummond, who played high school basketball with Mabrey’s brother and stood up for most of the 3-pointers she hit while parked courtside near the Lunar Owls bench.
Mabrey, playing the role of de facto little sister, properly rolled her eyes at in-game advice from Drummond, who regularly travels to Connecticut to see Mabrey play in the WNBA.
“I’ve known him since like eight years old,” Mabrey said. “Him and my brother played together. He’s close to my whole family, and he’s been really supportive of me as I’m coming up in this basketball world. He was talking mess with me before the game, saying, like, ‘oh are you going to make a shot today?’ All right, whatever, don’t talk to me.”
Philadelphia basketball royalty Dawn Staley was also in the house. Boston, a national champion at South Carolina under Staley, earned second-order Philadelphian status with the pregame hug she and her former mentor shared.
So loud was the environment, Bueckers said, that the Breeze installed hand signals to run their offense. It’s a far cry from the 1,000-seat Sephora Arena in suburban Miami, which housed all the games in the first season and a half of the player-owned league co-founded by Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier.
Friday was the first foray into taking the show on the road, and the reception could scarcely have been better.
“I thought it was really successful,” Bueckers, one of women’s basketball’s most marketable stars, said. “… Everything went well. And obviously, you see the crowd, you see it’s a sellout, and it was really successful. So I would love to make a few more stops, for sure.”
“It was great,” Boston said. “The environment was awesome. I think the fans, they just did a great job. And it continues to show women’s basketball, there’s just such a high need for it and a want for it. Philly’s amazing.”
If Unrivaled was looking for a proof of concept, it got it Friday.
And if the prospective contributors to a future Philadelphia WNBA team needed evidence of the city’s devotion to women’s hoops, they got it, too.
“I think it was awesome to see them come out and support us like that,” Mabrey said. “I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t realize it was going to be so much hype around it and so much support.”
All of that, Cloud would’ve offered in advance. Though 21,000 said it louder.
