WNBA-to-Portland Efforts Still Alive, But Obstacles Remain
After a planned expansion team fell through last year, there is interest from two prospective ownership groups in bringing women's professional basketball back to Portland.
A block from the Moda Center, there’s a billboard of Seattle Storm star Nneka Ogwumike that’s part of the WNBA’s new “Welcome to the W” ad campaign. It sprung up sometime in March, ahead of Portland hosting four days of Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight games in the record-breaking NCAA Women’s March Madness tournament.
If everything had gone according to plan, that campaign and those tournament games would have dovetailed with the launch of a planned Portland WNBA expansion team that was set to begin playing in 2025 alongside the new Bay Area franchise owned by the Golden State Warriors that the league announced last October.
Plans to add an expansion team in Portland got far enough down the road last summer that sources say Nike and Wieden+Kennedy had already prepared a campaign for the rollout. By the fall, a date of Oct. 26 was set for a press conference announcing that women’s professional basketball would be returning to Portland for the first time since their previous short-lived WNBA team, the Fire, folded in 2002.
And then at the last minute, everything fell apart.
ZoomInfo cofounder Kirk Brown, who had been in line to own the new franchise, suddenly pulled out of the project. Then, WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert sent a letter to Ron Wyden, Oregon’s senior U.S. Senator and a vocal public advocate for bringing a team to Portland, citing concerns about the timing of upcoming Moda Center renovations as the reason the league was moving on.
The truth behind why it fell apart is more complicated than that. So is the future of the effort, which is not completely dead despite that major setback.
While it’s too late now for a Portland expansion team to come together in time to start in 2025 alongside San Francisco, there is still interest from more than one ownership group in reviving the effort to bring a team to Portland in the next few years, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the discussions. But there are a lot of moving parts and it’s far from a sure thing that it comes to fruition.