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.
Why the WNBA’s Portland expansion plans fell short at the one-yard line
"[I]n light of the potential renovation of the Moda Center currently anticipated to take place during consecutive summers, consideration of a WNBA franchise for Portland will be deferred for now until the timing and scope of the arena improvements are settled," Engelbert wrote in the Nov. 1 letter to Sen. Wyden. "When the time is right, we look forward to pursuing prospects for bringing the WNBA to Portland."
The Trail Blazers, sources say, were blindsided by Engelbert’s decision and her stated reasoning for it, which they learned about when her letter to Sen. Wyden was made public. While the Blazers were not directly involved with Brown in the ownership group, they were and are strongly in favor of bringing a WNBA team to Portland to play games in the Moda Center, which they recently sold to the city but still maintain full operational control over. Blazers president of business operations Dewayne Hankins helped Brown secure meetings with the league office during the process and connected him with potential corporate sponsors in preparation for a new team playing in their building.
The Blazers made Engelbert and Brown aware of their renovation plans for the arena well in advance of any decision from the league’s end, and offered to delay the timing of some of that work to accommodate a new WNBA team playing their first two seasons there in 2025 and 2026, sources say.
The more likely reason Brown’s ownership group pulled out is the recent performance of ZoomInfo, which lost over 50 percent of its stock value in the year leading up to the WNBA bid being scuttled. Since he first made his interest in owning a team public in June of 2022, Brown’s pitch to the league had been that he was prepared to pour money into the team and run it like the Las Vegas Aces and New York Liberty, the WNBA’s current powers. At the time Brown was making those plans, the economics still penciled out for him in a way they may not have by the time the NBA’s board of governors was set to vote to approve the franchise.
Brown also reportedly had disagreements with the WNBA about the team’s name, as well as over his investment in a basketball training center called Shoot 360, which the league saw as a conflict of interest.
New bidders emerge as WNBA plans ambitious growth
The San Francisco team that’s starting up in 2025 will be the WNBA’s 13th franchise, and the league’s publicly stated goal is to grow to 16 teams by 2028. Where Portland figures in those expansion plans now is not clear.
Despite Engelbert citing the Moda Center renovations as the reason it fell through last fall, she has said multiple times since then that Portland is still in the running. In a February interview with the women’s basketball newsletter The Next, she admitted there was “definitely more to it” than just Portland’s arena situation and said it’s now about “finding the right ownership group.”
As recently as last month, at her press conference ahead of the April 15 draft, Engelbert named Portland as one of the cities the WNBA is still considering for expansion, along with Philadelphia, Toronto, Denver, Nashville and Miami. On Friday, CBC reported that Toronto is set to be awarded the league’s 14th team, which will begin playing in 2026.
With women’s basketball currently enjoying an unprecedented wave of mainstream attention and popularity, there’s more of an appetite than there’s ever been for the WNBA to grow. And Portland is in many ways the ideal market for a team, between the basketball tradition and the widespread support for women’s sports locally. If the Thorns are any indication, a WNBA team would be a massive success.
In the days following Brown pulling out of the effort last fall, sources say that Sen. Wyden and other Oregon power brokers canvassed business leaders in the state to gauge interest in salvaging the expansion effort. They came up empty initially, but since then, two prospective ownership groups have emerged with serious interest in making a bid for a WNBA expansion team, according to sources familiar with the discussions.
One of the potential bids is led by Monarch Collective, the sports-focused private equity fund led by venture capitalist Kara Nortman that co-owns the NWSL’s Angel City FC along with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.
The Oregonian reported on Friday that Damian Lillard was expected to be involved in the Monarch group’s bid.
The Bhathal family, who recently bought the Thorns from Merritt Paulson for $63 million, are also mulling a bid for a Portland WNBA team, sources say. The family, whose money comes primarily from swimwear manufacturing, are the largest minority owners of the Sacramento Kings and have made investments in the area around their arena, the Golden 1 Center, that are said to be north of $1 billion.
Raj Bhathal serves as Kings majority owner Vivek Ranadive’s alternate on the NBA’s board of governors; his two children, Lisa Bhathal Merage and Alex Bhathal, are running day-to-day operations with the Thorns. Since buying the team, the Bhathals have said they plan to build them a dedicated practice facility separate from the one they currently share with the Timbers.
Industry sources have consistently said that the WNBA’s asking price for an expansion fee for a new team is in the $50 million range. The Monarch group has plenty of money, and the Bhathals’ background and finances have already been vetted by the NBA because they’ve been involved in the league at the ownership level for over 10 years. Due to the exploding popularity of women’s basketball in the past year and the WNBA’s impending new media-rights deal, however, that price may go up by the time either group is in position to finalize a bid.
Uncertainty with Blazers’ Moda Center renovation plans
Finding a buyer to put up the money is not the only obstacle to the WNBA awarding a team to Portland. The timing of the Blazers’ planned updates to the Moda Center is still up in the air, and made even more complicated by original plan for a team to start up in 2025 falling through.
In February, the Blazers and the city of Portland reached an agreement on a five-year extension for the team’s lease with the Moda Center, which was set to expire in October of 2025. The deal, which also included transfer of ownership of the Moda Center from the Blazers to the city, is being treated as a bridge agreement as the team, city and other stakeholders figure out a long-term plan for updating the arena and redeveloping the Lower Albina neighborhood.
This past summer, the Blazers completed the first of a planned three summers’ worth of work on the 29-year-old arena, which was paid for by Vulcan chair Jody Allen, the team’s acting governor since the death of her brother, Paul, in 2018. That first stage focused on replacing the steel underneath the lower level and updating the courtside seats on the baselines. The next planned renovations include updating the video scoreboard, replacing the ice underneath the floorboards and making improvements to the club level and lower concourse.
Under the new bridge agreement announced in February, money the city makes on paid parking at the Rose Quarter and the 6 percent tax on tickets for Blazers games will be reinvested into the building; Blazers ownership will also continue to put money into the project.
The Blazers are aiming to have the rest of the renovations completed in time for the 2030 NCAA Women’s Final Four, which Portland is slated to host. Updating the arena and campus will also open up the possibility of Portland hosting NBA All-Star Weekend, which the Blazers have said they want to bid for closer to the end of the decade. Figuring out which two summers to complete the project is still to be determined, and the possibility of a WNBA team coming to town is another complicating factor.
During the expansion talks, sources say the WNBA requested that the new Portland franchise get to play its first two seasons at the Moda Center before being temporarily displaced to the Veterans Memorial Coliseum while the renovations are finished. The Blazers, sources say, agreed to postpone the work until 2027 and 2028 to allow the WNBA team to play there in 2025 and 2026.
In addition to the Moda Center renovations, the locker rooms at the 64-year-old Coliseum would need to be upgraded to meet the WNBA’s standards for a team to use them on a temporary basis. Over the past two years, the Blazers have given the WNBA league office and Brown’s group comprehensive tours of both buildings and blueprints for the updates to the Coliseum locker rooms (estimated to be in the $5-10 million range), all of which the league signed off on, sources say.
Blazers and Vulcan leadership still wants the team to happen and doesn’t want to be the reason it falls apart. But in light of the WNBA’s messaging after Brown’s departure from the bid, which pinned the effort’s failure on their renovation plans rather than Brown’s change of heart about owning the team, the Blazers may need some of these answers—and a firm commitment from the WNBA and one of these latest prospective ownership groups—sooner rather than later.
The WNBA has long viewed Portland as an ideal market to expand to because of the proven fanbase for women’s sports in the city. The Blazers feel the same way, and would love to have professional basketball in their building year-round. Until Brown pulled out, it felt like an inevitability. With the emergence of potential new bidders, the effort still on life support. But there are a lot of questions that still need to be answered.
Excellent as always Sean. It’s sad, but given how bad the basketball has been this year, these “business of basketball” articles have been some of my favorite from you this year. Thanks for writing about different, interesting things.
Any Phil Knight buzz? I was wondering if he would consider WNBA ownership, since his bid for the Blazers was rejected.