Portland Fire Nail Their Most Important Hire With New GM Vanja Černivec

📍PORTLAND, Ore. — A throwaway line from Lisa Bhathal Merage at last month's Epicenter of Women's Sports summit ended up telling us a lot about the plans for Portland's WNBA expansion team.

"We're at 12,500 [season-ticket deposits]," the Fire's co-owner and primary governor said near the end of a 40-minute panel discussion at the Hyatt Regency hotel in northeast Portland in late July. "We're outpacing the Valkyries, and we want to continue to do that."

Throwing shots at Golden State, which has set the bar for WNBA expansion teams impossibly high on and off the court in their first season, was an interesting choice for the owner of a franchise whose rollout to this point has been anything but smooth. Maybe Bhathal Merage's intent was to plant the seeds with fans for a rivalry between the Fire and Valkyries once her team is fully operational next summer.

Poaching the Valkyries' second highest-ranking basketball executive is one way to put your money where your mouth is on that front.

That aside, Tuesday morning's press conference to formally introduce Vanja Černivec as the Fire's first-ever general manager is the most impressed and encouraged I've been since the team was first announced last September.

In a year of stops and starts—taking seven months to hire a team president, and then parting ways with that president after less than three months—I've been concerned with how long they were taking to find a general manager. Next year's other incoming WNBA expansion team, the Toronto Tempo, have had a GM in place, Monica Wright Rogers, since February and have hired other front-office staff in the ensuing months. They've had a significant head start on Portland in putting together a plan for the expansion draft, interviewing head coaching candidates and preparing for free agency.

I was worried that after taking this long to find their own GM, whoever the Fire brought in would start out behind the curve.

But the more I learn about Černivec's background, and especially after hearing her lay out her vision for the team this morning, the more I think the Bhathals' search—however long it took—landed on the right person.

Much has been said about what a smash the Valkyries have been from a marketing and branding standpoint, but the basketball side of their operation has been just as impressive. They're likely going to make the playoffs as an expansion team, and their inaugural head coaching hire, Natalie Nakase, is widely viewed as the frontrunner to win Coach of the Year.

When Golden State GM Ohemaa Nyanin (who was in attendance Tuesday morning to support her top assistant in taking this job) hired Černivec last summer, it was a sign that they were going all-in on mining the international game for talent. Given where the sport is going, on both the men's and women's sides, it's not the worst approach to take, and it's paid off handsomely for the Valkyries.

If that's a preview of how Černivec is going to go about building her own team in Portland, there's a lot to like. And for those of us that were worried Portland's new GM would get a late start on evaluating the expansion draft, she just went through that process and knows the rules and talent pool as well as anyone.

Not that she's going to copy the Golden State model wholesale.

"I've learned a lot about building a culture," Černivec said Tuesday. "How to set up a foundation with a team. It's mostly about bringing good people in. But I also don't believe in copy-and-paste. I believe every city is different and every community is different."

What interested me the most was hearing how excited Černivec is about the Bhathals' greater operation. They broke ground in April on a practice facility in Hillsboro that will house both the Fire and the NWSL's Portland Thorns. (On this, interim team president Clare Hamill said Tuesday that the facility will open "in phases," the first of which will be ready by the start of the next NWSL season in March.) Since then, feedback I've gotten from people in the industry has been mixed. On the one hand, building a state-of-the-art athletic facility specifically designed for women seems like a great innovation. On the other, would a men's professional sports team ever be asked to share a building with a team in a different sport? I can see where both sides are coming from in that debate.

This is where Černivec's background in youth development, through her time working in basketball operations for the NBA Academy program, makes her the perfect person to execute the vision. She talked on Tuesday about her passion for youth sports, her belief that young athletes should stay off social media and how her varied background, which includes helping spearhead the NBA Academy Women's Program, a stint in the NBA as an international scout with the Chicago Bulls, two years as a GM in the Women's British Basketball League and helping build a very successful WNBA expansion team in the Bay Area, has informed her approach.

When she spoke about the Bhathals' grand plans to reinvent the way high-level women's professional sports teams operate, she was more convincing than anyone else I've heard try to sell it.

"They're the only owners that have two full portfolios with basketball and the soccer team," she said. "How they envision the practice facility in having a crossover in the performance center. Studying female athletes in terms of injuries and performance. That's something I'm super-passionate about. They've also talked about being innovative and doing things differently. A lot of times in sports, I've noticed we get stuck in cycles of doing things the same way for 20 years and not being able to step out of our comfort zones. That's what they're excited about."

Černivec says her first priority once she officially starts her new job on Sept. 15 will be hiring a head coach, and then building out the rest of her front office, basketball operations and analytics staff. She wants to get all of that done by the expansion draft—whenever that may be.

On that front, she's just as much in the dark rest of us.

"We're all in the same boat," Černivec said. "We don't know what's going to happen."

The WNBA's current collective-bargaining agreement expires on Oct. 31, and Front Office Sports reported this week that the league and the WNBPA are still far apart in negotiations and are unlikely to have a deal in place by that date. It's too early to say whether there will be a work stoppage, but needless to say, announcing a date or a set of rules for the expansion draft for the Fire and Tempo will be completely put on ice until there's a new CBA.

"For us, I think it's best to plan as though the negotiations are going to be done on time," Černivec said. "So we're planning for the expansion draft to go forward similar to last year, in December, and then free agency probably in February. If that doesn't happen, we're going to have to pivot and be ready for the unknown."

Until there's a new CBA, it will be impossible to know what the Fire's roster will look like next spring when they play their first game at Moda Center. They probably won't be as good as the Valkyries in year one, and it's totally fine if they're not. Getting a high lottery pick in a 2027 draft class headlined by Juju Watkins, Hannah Hidalgo and Madison Booker is a good outcome for an expansion team's first season.

But more than being unexpectedly competitive, the team Černivec and Nyanin built in Golden State this year is highly watchable. That's going to go a long way next year, when the Fire's inaugural season will have to give their season-ticket holders—that 12,500-plus number Bhathal Merage was touting—their money's worth.

I've thought from the beginning that someone like Černivec—not a big name but a grinder with diverse front-office experience and scouting acumen—is the kind of hire the Bhathals should look to make, and they did.

If they stole her from what could become a geographical rival? So much the better.