Where Does Portland Stand With the WNBA After Bay Area Announcement?

The WNBA is bringing its 13th team to San Francisco in 2025. There are strong indications that Portland is next.

The WNBA's long-rumored expansion is finally a reality.

On Thursday morning, the league announced that a 13th team, owned by the Golden State Warriors' ownership group, will begin playing in the Bay Area in 2025. It is widely expected that a 14th team will be announced in the coming weeks, also to launch in 2025, in the interest of keeping the league at an even number of teams.

For over a year, there's been a significant local effort to bring women's professional basketball back to Portland for the first time since the Fire folded in 2002. In February, Oregon's senior U.S. Senator, Ron Wyden, hosted WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert for a private roundtable event at the women's sports bar the Sports Bra, with Trail Blazers and Thorns executives making their pitch for Portland as an ideal WNBA market.

People familiar with the effort have told me consistently over the past several months that there's real optimism that Portland is in line to land an expansion team in the near future, although nothing has been finalized yet. The Next reported that discussions of a Portland team have reached the league level and could be approved by the NBA's Board of Governors soon.

Between a motivated ownership group and proven support for women's sports in the state of Oregon, there's been a belief from the beginning that Portland has as strong a case as any other market.

People familiar with the effort have told me consistently over the past several months that there's real optimism that Portland is in line to land an expansion team in the near future, although nothing has been finalized yet. The Next reported that discussions of a Portland team have reached the league level and could be approved by the NBA's Board of Governors soon.

Between a motivated ownership group and proven support for women's sports in the state of Oregon, there's been a belief from the beginning that Portland has as strong a case as any other market.

Vancouver, Wash.-based billionaire Kirk Brown, a cofounder of the business software firm ZoomInfo, is leading an ownership group that has made an aggressive pitch to the league with help from the Blazers. Brown, who lives in Las Vegas part-time, is an Aces season-ticket holder and avid WNBA fan. From what I've heard, he's made it clear to the league that he's willing to pay their asking price for an expansion fee (which could be well into nine figures), and plans to run the team the way Mark Davis runs the Aces and Joe Tsai runs the New York Liberty—by spending money and investing in it.

While the Blazers' parent company, Vulcan Inc., would not be involved in the ownership group for a WNBA team, they have been actively assisting Brown in getting meetings with the league as well as introducing him to potential corporate sponsors, according to people familiar with the discussions. The Blazers own the Moda Center and would profit from a WNBA team playing games there in the summer, even if they don't own the team.

The long-term future of the Moda Center is something that's currently being figured out. There two more summers' worth of major renovations needed after the team spent this summer replacing the steel underneath the baseline seats. The rest of the renovations have to get done before 2030, when Portland is set to host the NCAA Women's Final Four, but the Blazers have yet to decide on which two summers between now and then they'll target for it.

The Blazers' lease with the city of Portland expires in 2025 and the team is currently in negotiations for a new one. There is no thought that a new agreement won't happen, but from an order-of-operations standpoint, the team may want to finalize that before moving forward with the rest of the renovations.

The arrival of a WNBA team could also impact the timing of the renovations. From the beginning of the expansion discussions, the desire of everyone involved has been for a WNBA team to play at the Moda Center, rather than the smaller and older Veterans Memorial Coliseum, which is also undergoing some renovations ahead of the 2030 Women's Final Four.

One possible timeline that could work for everyone would be delaying the rest of the Moda Center renovations to the summers of 2027 and 2028. This would allow the WNBA team to play its first two seasons in 2025 and 2026 at Moda Center before temporarily moving over to the Coliseum for two years while the work is done, and would have the arena ready in time for the Final Four.

Blazers president of business operations Dewayne Hankins has said publicly several times that he hopes to bring NBA All-Star Weekend to Portland for the first time towards the end of the decade. These arena renovations will also be required before the NBA considers awarding that event to the Blazers. If they complete the renovations by 2028, Portland could be under consideration for an All-Star berth in 2029 or 2031, around the Final Four.

All of these factors could play into the timing of the arena renovations and what the Rose Quarter campus will look like for the next decade and beyond.

Portland previously had a WNBA team, the Fire, from 2000 to 2002. Over their three seasons, they averaged well over 8,000 fans per game, among the top in the league in attendance at the time. The reason they folded wasn't lack of fan interest, it was the changing ownership structure of the league.

At the beginning of the WNBA's existence, all of its teams were owned by the league and assigned to sister NBA teams in the same city. Late Blazers owner Paul Allen acted as chairman of the Fire but did not own the team. In 2002, the league voted to transfer ownership of its franchises to the NBA teams, who could either keep, sell or fold them. Allen chose to fold the Fire rather than sustain the financial losses that came with running it.

To this day, the WNBA is subsidized financially by the NBA and has yet to become a profitable business on its own. But the league has grown in popularity in recent years and in February 2022 raised a $75 million round of funding, with a significant amount of that money coming from Nike. There has been an increase in high-profile investors in the WNBA in the past few years. Tom Brady recently became a minority owner of the Aces, while Dwyane Wade purchased a stake in the Chicago Sky.

In that time, the popularity of women's sports at large has also exploded in Portland. The Thorns routinely lead the NWSL in attendance, and the Oregon and Oregon State women's basketball programs are enormously popular.

It is not known whether Portland's WNBA expansion team, if it happens, would revive the Fire name and logo or use a different identity.