January 21, 2026
Dominique Malonga continues focus on development at Unrivaled
By Bella Munson
Stevens: 'Dom's potential is incredible, and she's already really good at such a young age'
MEDLEY, FL. — When Dominique Malonga finished her rookie WNBA season with the Seattle Storm, the plan was to take some time off, get healthy and then play overseas with the Turkish club Fenerbahçe. Instead, it was announced a month later that she would be joining Unrivaled for its second season. The No. 2 overall pick in the 2025 WNBA Draft said she felt Unrivaled was the best choice for her personal development during the WNBA offseason.
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“I think just being here is the greatest way to improve in my game, and also for the WNBA season that’s coming up this summer. Really, it’s just a great environment to grow,” Malonga said after a close loss to Rose BC. “I’m really comfortable here. I have a great team also to just play with, have fun and compete, so it’s really fun. It’s a great place to be.”
What could have been a difficult adjustment for the young Frenchwoman, still in her first year in America, has been made smoother by the carryover of coaches from her rookie season with the Storm to the 3v3 league. Not only is her Unrivaled head coach, Noelle Quinn, the same, but Quinn also brought her assistant coach, Mitch Thompson, and player development coach, Marcus Tibbs, with her from Seattle to the offseason league.
“It was really, really helpful because I just knew them already,” Malonga said. “So it was super natural to get into this new environment altogether. I love them all, so I’m just really happy.”
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Quinn noted that Malonga spent a lot of on-court time with Tibbs during the Storm season, so using Unrivaled’s player development time to continue to grow upon that work has been beneficial. But Quinn is also a significant part of that development and has drawn praise from Malonga and her teammates.
“I just love how she just has a perfect balance of seriousness but also letting us be free and be elite in our respective roles,” Breeze BC forward Rickea Jackson told The IX Basketball. “This time is so versatile. Everyone can play multiple positions … and I feel like that’s why our chemistry has gotten so good. But that also goes into the account of Noelle. Like the offense she put in, it just allows us to make reads. … And I feel like that’s just going to continue to grow our mental game as well.
“But just playing for her and the things that she says to us, we definitely respect her a lot,” Jackson continued. “She is a very, very smart-minded basketball coach. So to play for her has been, honestly, fun. I love playing for Coach Noelle, and I feel like we just want to win for her.”
Malonga is also surrounded by peers who are close in age. Even though the 20-year-old is the youngest player on her Unrivaled team, Breeze BC, they are the youngest club in the league this season. Teammates Paige Bueckers, Cameron Brink and Jackson are all still 24 years old, while Kate Martin is 25, and Aari McDonald is the oldest at just 27. This stands in stark contrast to the veteran-heavy 2025 Storm team that boasted 35-year-olds Nneka Ogwumike and Skylar Diggins and 34-year-old Erica Wheeler as the oldest players. However, Malonga does not think her team’s youth affects how they learn and grow.
“At the end of the day, no matter the age, we’re still pros. I think here, everybody’s just doing the work,” Malonga said. “Yeah, of course, the vets have a lot of experience, and you can tell that they’re in this game for years. But even the young ones, I feel like we’re just professional and we’re just coming in and doing the work. … Like we’re just really motivated when we come here. We just want to get the job done. So I think being young doesn’t mean that we just doing less, like we’re really lucky and we just love being here.”
Quinn agrees, and she does not feel she has to act as a veteran voice for her young players, just as she never had to act as a veteran voice when leading a more experienced team. To Quinn, coaching a young team not so different from coaching Vets — she just makes sure to hit on every little detail, not skip over A and B to get to C. Per Quinn, though, Malonga and the other Breeze players are extremely smart, wise beyond their years.
Strong performances draw praise
Malonga’s first WNBA season demonstrated her immense potential, and Unrivaled has continued to show that off. In her first two games for Breeze BC, Malonga became the first player to record back-to-back double-doubles in their first two games, with 15 points and 14 boards in the opener and 15 points alongside 13 rebounds the next game. The 6’6 forward also recorded an Unrivaled career-high of 20 points in only 12 minutes against Rose BC on Jan. 11. She is averaging a double-double of 15.8 points and 11.4 rebounds, plus 1.2 blocks per game.
“She’s a monster,” Jackson praised. “She’s just so versatile and able to affect other people’s shots, and her ability to dunk … I feel like that’s where she’s so scary … but she’s gonna continue to grow. She just turned 20, but she’s so young and already affecting the game in ways that she has already. So I feel like, as she does continue to grow, she’s just gonna get better and better, and it’s just gonna be scary, honestly.”
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Malonga also draws praise from her opponents. After squeaking out the win for Rose BC, Azurá Stevens, who played against Malonga overseas several years before she was drafted into the WNBA, applauded the young talent.
“Dom’s potential is incredible, and she’s already really good at such a young age,” Stevens said. “Just her ability to really exploit in the pick and roll, and she does a really good job of keeping the ball up really high, so it’s hard to contest that. She’s long, she’s athletic. She got a little frustrated when we pressured her, but, you know, she’s young, she’ll learn.”
Her new teammates can also clearly see why her Storm teammates called her a future league MVP. Martin, who played with four-time MVP A’ja Wilson in Las Vegas and another potential future MVP in Caitlin Clark throughout her college career at Iowa, sees the parallel in how hard she works.
“Her work ethic is phenomenal. She comes in, she gets her work done, she gets a lot of extra shooting in. She’s very intentional when she’s at practice. She asks the right questions. She notices things, and she’s just a smart, high-IQ basketball player,” Martin told The IX Basketball. “I mean, coach Quinn said it the other day, she has no ceiling, we all have no ceilings. And so I really would never put a limit on anybody. I just think she has a lot of potential, and I’m excited to see where she’ll be even next year, or even in the next five years.”
Development through competition
Two of Malonga’s teammates could serve as examples for the kind of development she will experience playing at Unrivaled. Both Los Angeles Sparks forward Jackson and Golden State Valkyries guard Martin played in Unrivaled last year after their rookie seasons in the WNBA and felt that the experience made them better players when they returned to the WNBA for their second pro seasons. In particular, they say they utilized the ball screen reads that they performed consistently with Unrivaled, as well as the reps of one-on-one and ball-screen defense.
“I think it’s just game-like reps, and anytime you’re getting game-like reps and practicing at game speed, it’s going to be beneficial,” Martin said. “If you go half speed at something and just practice it, not live, you might not get better at it. But if you’re doing it game speed against the best competition in the world, I think that it will translate for sure.”
Beyond the 3×3 format, what also helps Unrivaled be such a great place for development is the environment itself.
“I would say we all take it seriously, we all care about this, but also at the same time, I think we know that we’re in Miami and you’re supposed to have fun,” Martin said. “You’re with a different team. It is a different format. This isn’t the W, so you might as well take advantage of that and just work on the things that you’ve been working on, and try to work out some kinks or weaknesses that you’ve had, and try not to be too hard on yourself.”
Even Quinn feels it is a looser environment where you can make what you want out of it, which is something she is personally committed to, along with just enjoying the experience.
“I think that Unrivaled does a really good job of providing everything that we need,” Stevens said. “In my second year, I’ve seen a lot of changes that they’ve made, and a lot of those were from recommendations from players. So, as a player, you feel really good when you know owners and GMs are listening to what you’re saying and then applying that change immediately. So we have everything we need here to continue to grow and get better, and that’s what it’s about in the offseason.
“When you have all the tools to be successful, it’s just on you to show up and put in the work. And that’s what we’re all trying to do here.”
As a fellow frontcourt player — though at 6’2 the forward also plays guard — Jackson thinks that the biggest aspect of the game Unrivaled will help Malonga with her physicality.
“I feel like for Dom, she’s already so finessed. She already has the fade, you know, so I feel like this would just make her be more physical if anything,” Jackson said. “Because sometimes you have to get your shot off by bumping someone first, or they’re not going to call it. So I feel like she’s growing in that. She’s learning that. And the more and more she just continues to play in this environment, she’s just going to naturally get it because she learns so quickly. She has a very high IQ, so for her to be able to do what she’s doing already has been amazing, but I feel like this league is just probably going to make her more physical.”
Malonga admitted that the physicality of Unrivaled has been one of the biggest and hardest adjustments for her to make. She is also adjusting to how much space she has to cover, how to keep the ball in her hands and make good decisions within the differentiated format. Even if she struggles through these challenges, she know they will make her a better player.
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“Really intense and high-level basketball, but I think that’s also the good part of it, that we get to compete on another level — testing our physical, testing our decision-making, testing our physical, we’re testing our skills,” Malonga said about the Unrivaled experience. “So it’s just a great place to really improve and discover something about our game.”
With the Storm, Quinn already saw Malonga develop immensely in a few short months. Coming from overseas to adjust to the WNBA presented its own physicality and speed adjustments for Malonga. It also required her to learn all of the matchups and tendencies in a larger league. Quinn feels that Malonga particularly learned how to be effective offensively, finding her groove with her turnaround shot and running the floor hard because she is a smart basketball player who was able to hone in on the process.
Now at Unrivaled, Quinn said they are building on some of what Malonga learned over the past year, but also focusing more heavily on her individual skillset. Per Quinn, they’re “understanding where she can exploit teams with being physical back or utilizing her agility and quickness in space … that can then lend toward five-on-five.”
One of the most exciting benefits of Unrivaled that Quinn sees for Malonga is the fact that she gets to play with the only player picked ahead of her in the 2025 WNBA Draft: No. 1 overall pick Bueckers.
“First, her playing with Paige is actually very exciting because she’s playing with a point guard who can see the floor well but gives Dom space to rock as well. So the pick and roll is really, really potent with those two,” Quinn told The IX Basketball. “But then, allowing Dom the autonomy to work in space and more threes for her, more ability to get downhill, other actions in areas of the floor that we can run a little bit more with the spacing.
“So it’s really just working on individual skill set more so than five-on-five schemes and ways to attack. Individual skill set is probably at the top of that, and then obviously working with her teammates to find ways to attack other teams offensively with our offensive advantages. But just the spacing in general allows the development of her other attributes that you know will continue to grow here and in the W.”
As she plays with and against some of the best players in the world, in an environment built for development, Malonga is moving even deeper into her limitless potential.
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Written by Bella Munson
Bella has been a contributor for The IX Basketball since September 2023 and is the site's Seattle Storm beat reporter. She also writes for The Equalizer while completing her Journalism & Public Interest Communication degree at the University of Washington.
