How Close is Portland to Securing a WNBA Expansion Team?

At a private roundtable event on Monday, Senator Ron Wyden and a group of Trail Blazers and Thorns executives made their case to commissioner Cathy Engelbert, but there's still work to be done.

PORTLAND, Ore. — For a lot of reasons, Portland would seem to be a no-brainer to be a part of the WNBA's long-rumored expansion.

The city and top decision-makers from the Trail Blazers and NWSL's Portland Thorns did their best to put all of those reasons on display at a private roundtable event on Monday, where Oregon's senior U.S. Senator, Ron Wyden, hosted WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert for what can best be described as a hard sell of the city to the league.

One of the selling points is the location of the event itself. Many of the power brokers of the state's sports scene, and a middle-school girls' basketball team, crowded into the Sports Bra, a relatively new establishment in northeast Portland opened by Jenny Nguyen with a novel concept: a sports bar that only airs women's sports.

That the Sports Bra is, by all accounts, doing huge business would seem to make Portland an attractive market for the WNBA. So would the widespread interest in the women's college game here—both Oregon head coach Kelly Graves and Oregon State head coach Scott Rueck were present on Monday, as well as several of their players, to speak to the community support their programs have gotten.

Consider also the makeup of the Blazers contingent that was at the Sports Bra on Monday. The organization's top executives on the basketball and business sides—general manager Joe Cronin and president of business operations Dewayne Hankins—were on the panel, but so were two of the three former WNBA players currently working in the Blazers' front office, director of basketball planning and strategy Asjha Jones and scouting manager Sheri Sam. (Tina Thompson, who joined the organization over the summer as a scout, was in attendance but did not participate in the roundtable.)

If there's anything that could sell a professional women's sports league on a city being worthy of an expansion team, that collection of names in that room is it.

"I feel like I'm on the basketball version of Shark Tank," Engelbert joked after Wyden gave her the rundown of attendees.

But there are still hurdles the city and league have to clear to make it happen.

It's unclear how far down the road the WNBA is in the expansion process. The Athletic's Mike Vorkunov (a former guest on my podcast) reported back in June that Portland is on a shortlist of six cities currently being considered for one of a planned two new teams, along with San Francisco, Oakland, Nashville, Philadelphia and Toronto. At that point, their hope was for the two new cities to be announced by the end of 2022 to begin play as soon as the 2024 season. That obviously did not happen, and Engelbert said after Monday's event that the earliest new teams could start playing is 2025.

"We're not in a rush," the commissioner said. "I'd like to do it by 2025-ish. I would say two to four years out, I'd like to see at least two teams come into the league and longer-term, more than that."

Like the NBA, the WNBA has a media-rights deal up for renewal in 2025. And like the NBA, the WNBA is more likely to expand after that piece of business is taken care of.

"If you look at men's leagues that are a lot older—50, 100 years older than us—they've got big media-rights deals," Engelbert said Monday. "So with expansion, if you can bring two to four more cities in, that expands your fanbase and helps your media-rights valuation. But women's sports is undervalued today, so we're hoping to do it with our 12 teams."

People in the league and industry I've talked to in the past six months believe putting a team in the Bay Area is the WNBA's top priority, and Joe Lacob, the Warriors' deep-pocketed owner, has expressed interest in bringing a team to the Chase Center. But Portland would appear well-positioned to get the nod as the second city if the league does indeed add two teams. There is significant interest in expanding the WNBA's footprint to Canada, with an exhibition game in Toronto between the Chicago Sky and Minnesota Lynx scheduled for May as a trial run. But with the WNBA's players still taking commercial flights to and from games, there could be significant customs and border issues with a team playing a full-season schedule there.

Philadelphia's case is hurt by the 76ers not owning the Wells Fargo Center and thus not having control of dates at the arena. That hurdle is not an issue for the Blazers, who own the Moda Center and are supportive of a WNBA team playing there in the summer.

Over the next half-decade, the Moda Center and greater Rose Quarter campus are set to undergo renovations to modernize one of the oldest arenas in the NBA, which opened in 1995. In November, Portland was announced as the host city for the 2030 NCAA Women's Final Four. The Blazers also hope to bring NBA All-Star Weekend to Portland for the first time towards the end of the 2020s. Renovations to the arena and campus will be required before either of those events can happen, and those updates will also make it more palatable for a WNBA team to play in the Moda Center.

Portland's short-lived previous WNBA franchise, the Fire, played at the then-Rose Garden for three seasons from 2000 to 2002. At the time, the WNBA had ownership of all of its teams, which were entirely in NBA markets and tied to NBA teams. Late Blazers owner Paul Allen acted as chairman of the Fire during its existence but did not actually own the team. In 2002, the NBA's Board of Governors voted to restructure ownership of the teams, selling them back to the owners of their NBA counterparts and allowing for third-party buyers; Allen opted to fold the Fire rather than absorb the financial losses that would come with owning the team, especially given that NBA teams also weren't in nearly as strong a place at the time as they are now.

The Fire averaged more than 8,000 fans per game during their brief run, which put them among the top teams in the league in attendance at the time. But the team, like the rest of the league, still lost money. To this day, the WNBA is subsidized financially by the NBA and has yet to become a profitable business. But about a year ago, the league raised $75 million in a new round of funding, with a significant portion of that money coming from Nike. There is clearly an appetite from the NBA and its partners to continue growing the WNBA despite questions about its short-term financial viability, and between the Thorns and Oregon and Oregon State women's basketball programs, the popularity and fan support for women's sports in the state of Oregon would suggest that a new WNBA franchise would have as good a chance in Portland as it would anywhere else of being a success.

Nike's equity investment in the WNBA may also be a point in Portland's favor, given that the company's headquarters are based in Beaverton and that proximity could aid in new marketing and earning opportunities for WNBA players—not to mention Nike founder Phil Knight's well-documented interest in buying the Blazers whenever Vulcan decides to sell.

On the subject of ownership: Vancouver, Washington-based billionaire Kirk Brown, the cofounder of ZoomInfo, was in attendance Monday, not on the panel but receiving shoutouts from both Wyden and Hankins. It is widely assumed that Brown, who currently lives in Las Vegas and is an Aces season-ticket holder and avid WNBA fan, has the inside track to owning Portland's franchise should it come to fruition.

The league is currently in the midst of its most active and high-profile free agency period ever, with the Aces and New York Liberty developing into "superteams" behind significant financial investment from their respective owners, Mark Davis and Joe Tsai. The general belief is that Brown would run a Portland WNBA franchise in much the same way, pouring resources into it, in contrast to some of the longer-tenured and less wealthy owners who have pushed back against things like Tsai chartering a plane for the Liberty during the 2021 season.

From what I've heard, the Blazers have been actively working behind the scenes to assist Brown in getting meetings with Engelbert and NBA commissioner Adam Silver, as well as helping introduce him to potential corporate sponsors for a new WNBA franchise.

Even though the Vulcans would likely not be directly involved in ownership of the team, it would need the Blazers' support to use the arena and gain access to marketing and infrastructure resources. On Monday, all of the most important voices in the Blazers organization were there along with Wyden to make it known to Engelbert that the support is there from their end.

Wyden and the Blazers, Thorns and collegiate contingents made a compelling case on Monday. From my vantage point, it's hard to picture another city having this strong an argument across the board, between the existing support for women's sports, a basketball-crazed fanbase and an NBA team on the record as wanting a WNBA franchise to play in the building they own during the summers. The event had the feel of a soft launch of a team that had already been awarded to the city, not an appeal to the commissioner for consideration.

However, people I've spoken with close to the process have been quick to downplay the idea that Portland is a frontrunner for expansion, even after an event that can only be described as a huge success. The Bay Area and Toronto threats loom large, but Portland has some definite points in its favor, and everyone at the Sports Bra on Monday did everything they could to put their best foot forward.

The ball appears to be in Engelbert's court now. For her part, she was complimentary of the effort but ultimately noncommittal.

“This event tonight has been great to see the love and the fandom," she said. "What the Senator has pulled together here as far as advocates around the Portland ecosystem, I think is really important. I wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t on the list.”