WNBA adds 15th franchise with return to Portland

Less than 11 months after WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert wrote in a letter that consideration of a Portland expansion team would be “deferred for now,” the league announced Wednesday a return to the city as its 15th franchise, to begin play in the 2026 season.

Portland previously entered the WNBA as the expansion Fire in 2000 before folding after the 2002 season, when the league moved from central ownership to individual ownership of teams.

The new team will be owned and operated by RAJ Sports, led by controlling owner Lisa Bhathal Merage and her brother, Alex Bhathal. They also are the majority owners of the NWSL’s Portland Thorns.

This is the first time the WNBA will return to a city it previously left, although Engelbert expressed an openness to do so again in the future.

“I don’t think we ever have a bias as to whether there was a team there before or not,” Engelbert told ESPN, “but certainly I think Portland has proven they’ll show up for women’s sports and definitely for women’s basketball, so we’re excited to be coming back to the market.”

Engelbert’s letter in November was addressed to Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, a champion of women’s sports who had been working closely with the bid and hosted the commissioner at the nation’s first sports bar dedicated solely to women’s sports, the Sports Bra, during a site visit to Portland last year.

Wyden had described the reaction to that news, which came after he had his bag packed for an expected announcement that Portland would rejoin the WNBA in 2025 alongside the Golden State Valkyries, as “72 hours of really bitter disappointment.”

“After 72 hours, we said, ‘Back on our feet, we’re going to get this done,'” Wyden told ESPN. “It really was a constant building and a process from then. I am particularly appreciative of Cathy because she’s got me calling her, saying, ‘What’s next, what should we do, what’s the path? We don’t want to give up.’

“Cathy brought a combination of cheerleading, which is important, with the kind of nuts and bolts. I’m not going to get into it, but I’m so appreciative of Alex and Lisa working through some of the stuff that really took us down the first time. Cathy went through some of that in the letter that she sent, the very gracious letter, making it clear she wanted us to keep going.”

First, the WNBA needed to find a new Portland ownership group. Enter the Bhathal family, which already had been evaluating the area closely in preparation for its purchase of the Thorns.

“As we were pursuing the Thorns, we became very convinced that the Portland market was a great market for sports in general and women’s sports,” Alex Bhathal told ESPN. “Having seen the media reports that the WNBA opportunity was something the WNBA wanted to do, but there were some issues with the timing and potentially finding the right ownership group, it became an ‘aha’ moment that maybe this is something that we could do as well and create a multisport platform in the market and really cement Portland as the epicenter for women’s sports.”

From its end, the WNBA remained committed to Portland as a destination, even as another expansion franchise was awarded to Toronto in May.

“As I started to learn more about Alex and Lisa and their platform for women’s sports,” Engelbert told ESPN, “it wasn’t announced yet on their Thorns ownership, but it seemed pretty interesting because we knew based on our data analysis, the data would show Portland would be a great market for the W.”

The Thorns have been a flagship franchise for the NWSL, winning three championships and leading the league in attendance before the arrival of expansion franchises in Los Angeles and San Diego. Portland now ranks third behind those teams, averaging more than 18,000 fans per game this season.

“I think Portland has proven they’ll show up for women’s sports and definitely for women’s basketball, so we’re excited to be coming back to the market.”

WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert, on the league’s return to Portland

Women’s college basketball also has drawn well in Portland, which hosted a regional in this year’s NCAA tournament and will bring the Final Four to the Moda Center for the first time in 2030.

“My guess,” Wyden said jokingly, “is it won’t be very long before people start calling it ‘Sportslandia.'”

The timeline of the Final Four was one of the complications to WNBA expansion. The NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers, who operate the Moda Center, anticipate two summers’ worth of renovations to the arena between the arrival of the WNBA team and the hosting of the Final Four. That work would force the expansion team to relocate, likely next door to the Trail Blazers’ former home at Veterans Memorial Coliseum, although not until after it plays at least its first season at the Moda Center.

“The timeline is being determined at this point, and those are still subject to negotiations,” Alex Bhathal said. “Our expectation is we’ll be playing at the Moda Center. There could be a situation where we play on a temporary basis at somewhere else, the VMC, but because of the indeterminate nature of those negotiations, our base case is we’ll be playing in Moda Center for the visible future.”

The Fire played at the Moda Center during their three WNBA seasons. Despite never making the playoffs, the Fire had a higher average attendance in their final year (2002) than six other teams, including two current ones: the Minnesota Lynx and Seattle Storm. Portland also played host to a women’s franchise in the short-lived American Basketball League, the Power, who played at Memorial Coliseum.

Still to be determined is whether the expansion team will reclaim the Fire name or choose a new one. Bhathal Merage said “everything is on the table” and that the decision will be based on community input.

“It’s an exciting time,” she said. “It’s fun to be able to create a new team from scratch. Our hope is by the spring we’ll have an announcement, but we do of course have deadlines if we want to have more customized jerseys with Nike and things like that.”

Another upcoming announcement will involve a practice facility for the WNBA team, which was a key component of the league’s evaluation of potential expansion sites. Three teams now have their own exclusive facilities, with the Storm and Phoenix Mercury both opening them this season after the Las Vegas Aces did last year. Two franchises that don’t share practice facilities with NBA counterparts, the Chicago Sky and Dallas Wings, have announced plans to build them.

“Plans are coming together, but that will be a follow-up announcement,” Alex Bhathal said. “We will be investing in a training center for the WNBA as well as the Thorns. Those are commitments that we have made. They’ll be first-class, state-of-the-art facilities.”

Portland has slightly more time to prepare for its first season than the Valkyries, who were introduced as an expansion franchise in October and will begin play in 2025. The Toronto team, which will enter the league alongside Portland in 2026, has more lead time after a May announcement.

Engelbert said the WNBA is “on track” to add a 16th franchise in either 2027 or 2028.

“We’ll look very hard at what Team 16 might look like,” she said, “but on track for no later than ’28 for Team 16.”

Thus far, Golden State’s launch has set the bar for expansion teams. Last week, the Valkyries announced that they have secured a record 17,000-plus season ticket deposits, the most ever for a women’s professional sports team. Bhathal Merage said that news spurred a flurry of emails among the Portland expansion group.

“Our goal is to surpass that number, and we think we can do it in Portland,” she said. “We have the most passionate, vibrant community of supporters for women’s sports really anywhere in the world.

“We think 20,000 deposits for the 2026 season sounds pretty good,” added Bhathal.