Portland's Delayed WNBA Expansion Was a Blessing in Disguise

It took a year too long, but Portland found the right ownership group for its new basketball team.

📍 PORTLAND, Ore. — The gathering that took place on the court at Moda Center on Wednesday afternoon was supposed to happen 328 days ago.

Oct. 26, 2023 was the date the Trail Blazers and WNBA had on the books for a press conference announcing that Portland would be awarded the league’s 14th franchise, to start playing alongside a just-unveiled Bay Area team and be owned by ZoomInfo cofounder Kirk Brown.

Those plans falling apart at the last possible moment was a disaster and a public embarrassment for everyone involved, and the fallout led most people to assume Portland had blown its chance to get in on the WNBA’s recent wave of explosive growth, even as the most obvious fit on the planet for a city to put a women’s professional sports franchise in.

I came away from Wednesday thinking that last fall’s smoked layup was the best thing that could have happened, if the end goal was to not only put a WNBA team in Portland but give it a real chance to become the kind of local institution its NBA counterpart is.

WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert stood onstage today, in front of all the local sports and political VIPs you’d expect to be at something like this, and presented the orange-and-white game ball to Lisa Bhathal Merage and her brother, Alex Bhathal, officially introducing them as the owners of a team that will play its first season at the Moda Center in 2026.

It would have been nice if the team was starting in 2025, as originally planned. But you know what’s better? Having what seems at first blush like the right ownership group in place.

Unlike Brown, the Bhathals have already proven that they’ll invest in women’s sports in this city. They paid $63 million for the Thorns earlier this year and are planning to build them a much-needed practice facility separate from the Timbers. (It’s a badly-kept secret around town that they’re planning to fold their new WNBA team’s facility into the same building, but those details are still being ironed out.)

Unlike Brown, the Bhathals are a known quantity not just to fans of women’s sports in Portland but to the NBA. Alex and Lisa’s father, Raj, has been part of the Sacramento Kings ownership group for over a decade, serving as Vivek Ranadive’s alternate on the NBA’s board of governors. When it came to this week’s final vote to approve the franchise, the league didn’t have to do too much legwork to vet them, and Blazers president of business operations Dewayne Hankins didn’t have to vouch for them to Engelbert and Adam Silver. They were already in the family, which makes everything easier to push through and reassures the people that need to be reassured that they know what they’re doing.

And unlike Brown, the Bhathals have the kind of resources needed to give this thing a chance to succeed. Their money comes from a variety of sources—including swimwear manufacturing and real estate—making them less vulnerable to economic shifts. Brown’s main company, ZoomInfo, saw its stock price fall by over 50 percent in the year leading up to when he would have finalized the bid, raising doubts about whether he’d have the kind of cash not just to buy a team, but to compete with the deep-pocketed owners of the Las Vegas Aces and New York Liberty, not to mention the Warriors ownership group that’s heading up the brand-new Golden State Valkyries.

Add to that, Brown was reportedly insistent that his new WNBA team be named the Rose City Royalty. If the options were that or no team at all, you’d take it. But I think we can all agree that that’s a terrible name and the Bhathals can only do better.

(On the naming front, Bhathal Merage said Wednesday that they’re planning to open it up to the community for suggestions and they haven’t decided on anything yet.)

The fact that this is even happening at all is the biggest tell that the real hangup last year was the ownership group, not the Blazers’ still-unsettled renovation plans for the Moda Center, which Engelbert publicly cited at the time as the reason it didn’t happen.

It’s true that the Blazers still need to do two more summers’ worth of work on the arena to get it ready for the 2030 NCAA Women’s Final Four, and that those updates will likely force the WNBA team to play a couple of seasons across the street at Veterans Memorial Coliseum. But they still haven’t figured out the timing. The only thing that’s been announced is that the new WNBA team will play its inaugural season at Moda in 2026; everything beyond that is still up in the air as the Blazers and city of Portland continue to negotiate a long-term lease.

Last fall, it didn’t fully check out that Engelbert wouldn’t have been aware of where those plans stood until the very last minute, or that the talks would have gotten as far as they did if that were truly an issue. Clearly, it wasn’t, because the renovation plans still haven’t been finalized and that didn’t stop the league from officially awarding Portland a team today.

No matter who the ownership group was, a WNBA team in Portland would have been a license to print money. The Thorns have led the NWSL in attendance for all but two seasons of that league’s existence, the Blazers’ ticket sales remained strong even in the first season of what could be a long rebuild, and the two biggest sports apparel companies in the world have their headquarters in the area. Alex Bhathal on Wednesday challenged the Portland community to get to 20,000 season-ticket deposits, and there’s a non-zero chance they get there.

But getting people to buy tickets is easy when they’re just excited the sport they’ve wanted for years is coming to town. At some point when the honeymoon period is over, it’s on those owners to run the team well and give those fans a product worth paying for, just like in every other major professional sports league.

Time will tell how the Bhathals do in that part of it. They have to hire a team president and a general manager, and eventually a coach, and then those people have to build a roster. We’ll see what the practice facility ends up looking like.

Building a team completely from scratch isn’t easy.

Based on what we know now, I’m not sure the previous prospective ownership group would have been up to the job. It’s a much safer bet that the Bhathals will hold up their end of the promise.