WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert took the five-minute drive west on Broadway Monday night. She left an event touting Portland as a city deserving an expansion franchise and headed straight for the Moda Center.
Could Portland’s route to landing a WNBA team be so direct?
There’s a lot of corporate red tape to sort through. A pending media rights deal colors the decision. And a host of bigger cities angling for the exact same thing.
But Portland is making a heck of a run at it.
On Monday, Sen. Ron Wyden hosted a roundtable event that amounted to a pep rally. The event was held at The Sports Bra — the cleverly named bar dedicated to women’s sports.
Wyden has made the WNBA push his cause celebre. He surrounded Engelbert with top executives from the Trail Blazers and Thorns, as well as reps from the Beavers and Ducks, all with one message: Bring the WNBA to Portland.
Or as Oregon State women’s coach Scott Rueck declared, “The ‘W’ to Portland is just a massive W.”
How does Engelbert say no to that?
Or, more to the point, why would she put herself in a position where she would have to?
This didn’t feel like a pitch meeting. It felt like a soft launch of a new basketball future.
A group of eager-eyed middle school girls stared back at Engelbert from the front row. Dreams of an interstate rivalry with the Seattle Storm were floated. Ducks coach Kelly Graves called an expansion team a “no-brainer.” Thorns general manager Karina LeBlanc said simply, “This is a community that’s ready.”
I half-expected Engelbert, who was in town for meetings at Nike, to grab the microphone and announce, “OK, Portland, I give. We’ll see you in 2025.”
That didn’t happen, of course, but the event made the WNBA’s return to Portland feel like a real possibility.
But this isn’t a deal that’s going to get done with soundbites. That’s why Engelbert’s migration from the promotional event to the Moda Center caught my interest.
You know who else trickled in prior to tipoff?
Wyden, for one. Also Kirk Brown, the millionaire tech CEO who has expressed interest in funding an expansion team and had stood at the edge of the crowd at The Sports Bra while every other power player in Portland’s WNBA quest gave Engelbert the fullcourt press.
It’s possible they all just wanted to take advantage of their proximity on a game night. But here’s hoping these people who have the ability to make this thing happen found a few minutes together away from the cameras and the famous faces to discuss its viability.
Monday’s show was political performance by Wyden, no doubt. But it also was a very public manifestation of negotiations that have long been held in private. Brown was tight-lipped on Monday, but those close to the plans have said that his efforts are extremely detailed.
He’s a serious bidder.
Portland has the visionaries and the infrastructure. The Blazers have put their full support behind Brown’s effort. All it needs now is the OK from Engelbert.
Portland has long punched above its weight as a sports town. The presence of Nike, a significant stakeholder in the league, should not be overlooked, although it’s hard to see that being a deciding factor.
Engelbert didn’t pin herself to a timeline for announcing expansion cities, saying only that new teams would likely need to be announced 18 months before starting play in 2025. She previously expressed a desire to identify target cities by the end of 2022, but has so far only established that the WNBA is considering 10 cities.
The most she could say at this point is that Portland is one of them.
This feels like an important opportunity for the Rose City. The last three years have not been kind to its reputation.
But its position as a global leader in women’s sports has never been stronger. And landing a WNBA franchise at the same time the Thorns find new ownership feels like a transformative moment in women’s sports.
About those Thorns.
Despite persistent turmoil, they drew more than 15,000 fans per match last season.
Soccer crowds aren’t necessarily analogous with hoops, but it’s worth highlighting that the Indiana Fever drew just 1,776 fans per game. A third of the 12-team WNBA averaged fewer than 4,000 fans per game.
Both Oregon and Oregon State are eclipsing that mark this season in Eugene and Corvallis. And that’s with both teams experiencing down seasons.
When the WNBA last staked an outpost here, with the Fire from 2000-02, the team drew 8,500 fans per game before folding as Paul Allen was taking losses on the Blazers. So the question isn’t whether the WNBA would find a foothold in Portland or if it could have impact.
It’s whether the league will value a market that fits its brand and promotes its values over untapped metropolises like San Francisco and Toronto.
Because if Engelbert sees the path to profitability through densely populated cities that will provide a boost to the league’s next media rights deal, Portland might face an insurmountable obstacle in this expansion cycle.
We might simply be boxed out.
But what Portland can offer was on full display on a micro-scale at Monday’s promotional event, with a United States senator playing to a packed house at the country’s first sports bar dedicated to women’s sports, leading some of the state’s most prominent sports figures in cheers of support.
I’d hate to be the one who says no to that.
— Bill Oram | boram@oregonian.com | Twitter: @billoram
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