The WNBA’s recognition is booming — and the league is aware of that is when to take benefit and increase.
Wednesday, the WNBA made formal the long-expected: The league will add a fifteenth crew in Portland, beginning play in 2026.
The Portland franchise will probably be owned by RAJ Sports activities, run by Lisa Bhathal Merage and Alex Bhathal. Lisa Bhathal Merage will function the controlling proprietor and WNBA Governor. The household has expertise proudly owning skilled groups, they’re buyers within the Sacramento Kings and are the controlling house owners of the Nationwide Ladies’s Soccer League’s Portland Thorns (who common 18,000 followers a recreation).
“That is enormous for Portland. We’re so honored and humbled to be the vessel that delivers this WNBA franchise to Portland,” Lisa Bhathal Merage informed the Related Press. “And that is actually how we take into account ourselves. Portland is that this extremely various, enthusiastic neighborhood. We noticed the eagerness first-hand after we began wanting into the Portland Thorns and that is Basketball Metropolis. So we’re very excited concerning the future.”
Portland had a earlier WNBA crew, the Hearth, which performed for simply two seasons and folded in 2002. It isn’t but determined if the brand new franchise will hold that identify or get a brand new one. The crew will play on the Moda Heart, additionally residence to the Portland Path Blazers.
“Because the WNBA builds on a season of unprecedented progress, bringing a crew again to Portland is one other necessary step ahead,” WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert stated in a press release asserting the brand new crew. “Portland has been an epicenter of the ladies’s sports activities motion and is residence to a passionate neighborhood of basketball followers. Pairing this vitality with the Bhathal household’s imaginative and prescient of main top-flight skilled sports activities groups will make sure that we ship a premier WNBA crew to the higher Portland space.”
This season, 12 WNBA groups are preventing it out all the way down to the ultimate day (Thursday) for eight playoff spots, however in two years, that can soar as much as 15 groups within the W. The league had already introduced two growth groups — the Golden State Valkyries, which begins play in 2025, and a Toronto franchise to start in 2026 — and Portland provides to that. The league has made it clear it desires so as to add a sixteenth crew that might begin play by 2028 (Philadelphia, Denver, Nashville and Miami are among the many cities being thought of).
It was initially anticipated Portland could be introduced as an growth crew final fall with a unique proprietor, ZoomInfo co-founder Kirk Brown. Nevertheless, Brown backed out late within the course of, forcing the league to search for new house owners. Engelbert blamed the change on upgrades to the Moda Heart on the time however shortly walked again these statements.
Regardless of the setback, the league was centered on Portland due to the eagerness for ladies’s sports activities there — on the College of Oregon and Oregon State, the skilled sports activities groups within the area just like the Thorns, and it is town with a devoted girls’s sports activities bar known as The Sports activities Bra.
“Once you have a look at our numbers, not simply the Thorns’ off-the-charts attendance, which is unbelievable, what you’ve got seen, in Eugene, what you’ve got seen in Oregon State, we knew that this was going to be one of many nice moments in sports activities for Oregon,” U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden informed the Related Press. “We noticed, February of 2023, what was potential. So I can let you know that proper now there are girls playmaking in Portland. They’re rebounding in Roseburg, they’re hooping in Hermiston. Each nook and cranny of our state is into this.”
