Natasha Cloud isn’t the kind of player who needed to reach her 30s before understanding the contours of the wider world around her. She didn’t need a homecoming to understand the value of coming home.
But at 33, this week has presented at least a moment to appreciate the trends swirling around her.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Cloud was a standout player at Cardinal O’Hara, then Maryland, then Saint Joseph’s. One of the first generation to grow up with women’s professional basketball via the WNBA as an accessible commodity, she aspired to be Dawn Staley, someone from Philadelphia who made good on the global hoops stage.
And now, as she’s about to play basketball for a crowd in Philadelphia for the first time in a decade, it’s come full circle to Cloud being the one young girls will be idolizing.
Guard Natasha Cloud, playing for the New York Liberty, gestures after hitting a 3-pointer past Phoenix Mercury guard Kahleah Copper in a WNBA playoff game on Sept. 14, 2025. The two Philly-area natives will be in town Friday for a doubleheader for the Unrivaled 3-on-3 league. (AP Photo/Darryl Webb)
“You had so many different role models from the Philly area to really just be able to see yourself in as a kid,” Cloud said last week, ahead of Friday’s Unrivaled doubleheader at the Xfinity Mobile Arena. “And I wanted to be Dawn Staley, not only on the court, but off the court too, with the swag that she has. So, just really thankful for all those pivotal models that we had. And it’s really cool that now in hindsight, for some little kids, that’s me and Kah (Kahleah Copper) out of the city of Philly now.”
Cloud and Copper, the North Philly product by way of Rutgers, are among the headliners for a sold out doubleheader of the player-owned 3-on-3 league taking over the South Philly Sports Complex.
Cloud’s Phantom squad, which includes Kelsey Plum and 2023 WNBA No. 1 overall pick Aliyah Boston, takes on the Paige Bueckers-led Breeze in the first game at 7 p.m. The 8:45 nightcap includes Copper’s Rose vs. the Lunar Owls, led by Skylar Diggins and Napheesa Collier.
It’s a collection of the best talent in the women’s basketball world descending on Philadelphia, a preview of what fans in the city hope the WNBA’s arrival in 2030 could be like.
Cloud, whose New York Liberty teammate Breanna Stewart is one of the league’s founders with Collier, knew of plans to expand beyond the league’s permanent base in Medley, Fla., in its second season.
But that Philly was the first destination was a lovely surprise Cloud had the chance to share with the world.
“I found out just a few days before the actual event” in October at Love Park, Cloud said. “I knew that we were always going to try to start playing games out of market as soon as Year 2, but we hadn’t heard any updates. So when I got the call from Clare (Duwelius, Unrivaled executive vice president) that they wanted me to come make the announcement for Philly, I was just as excited as every Philly fan.”
Playing at home in the winter isn’t a trivial matter for players like Cloud. A veteran of 10 WNBA seasons — she opted out of the bubbled 2020 season — with Washington, Phoenix and New York, Cloud used to travel the world in her offseasons. Her first two years as a pro involved near nonstop playing, going from Washington to Besiktas in Turkey and Townsville in Australia.
That was the economic imperative a decade ago for female basketball players to scratch out a living, their earnings from the WNBA summer season insufficient to stretch throughout the year. The detention of Brittney Griner in 2022 while she played in Russia underscored the danger that economic precariousness brought to WNBA players.
Cloud was part of the Athletes Unlimited League that started in 2022 as a bridge through the winter before Unrivaled formed with more athlete-forward star power. It’s not just advocacy — Cloud describes it as a league “to keep women home, to keep women safe, to pay women what they deserve” — but a way to cash in on the attention athletes generate that other institutions may not be fully capitalizing on.
“Unrivaled has been a blessing to not only myself, my body, but my family and the means of providing for them,” Cloud said. “I get to stay stateside. I get to work on my craft for a lot of the offseason, and then I get to go into an Unrivaled season where I see the most elite athletes every single night. I have to go against them. I have to guard them. And then I get the most elite treatment.”
That value is more pronounced this winter, with players in the midst of an acrimonious showdown with the WNBA.
A Jan. 9 deadline to negotiate an expiring collective bargaining agreement passed as the league is expanding with teams in Portland and Toronto that require logistical leeway in the preseason. Players are asking for greater revenue sharing as well as continued increases in wages and conditions.
Unrivaled is not directly involved, though Collier is the vice president of the WNBA Players Association. But it provides a living example of what player-driven success looks like. And it’s coincidentally an engine of solidarity, with so much of the labor the WNBA depends on living together in Florida.
Cloud calls the Unrivaled setting in suburban Miami a college campus feel where the veteran is forming new friendships even with players she’s seen as opponents for the last decade.
“Unrivaled presents such a different blueprint, because we’re all in the same space,” she said. “I’ve gotten to know players that I played against for — I’m about to go into my 11th year — that otherwise I wouldn’t have known them. But now that we’re here every day, we get to see each other. Every day we get to see each other in the apartments, there’s just more of an opportunity for a deeper connection, deeper relationships, which when we are in this fight for a CBA coming up, we’re all aligned.”
This week, that space shifts to Philly for four of the league’s eight teams. Tickets have been sold out for weeks. Considering that Unrivaled’s home venue is the 1,000-seat Sephora Arena, it’s a big jump in attendance to the 20,000-seat Xfinity Mobile Arena.
Call it another act of discovery: Players are constantly driving the WNBA to dream bigger as to what women’s basketball can be. Unrivaled is a brick-and-mortar proof of concept that maybe if you give basketball fans a quality product, they’ll respond.
Cloud spoke to that exercise of faith at the introductory press conference in October. She answered the question of why Philly for the first destination to Unrivaled CEO (and Collier’s husband) Alex Bazzell.
“I said, I promise you that this was not a mistake,” Cloud said. “You took a chance on Philly because we don’t really know what the market is in Philly for a women’s basketball team. But they took a chance and an opportunity, and I just knew our city was going to show out, because I grew up there. …
“I knew it was going to happen, because I know what a demand there is in our city for sports, and then there’s been such an even higher demand for our women’s team to come in, so just really excited overall.”
