A WNBA revival in Portland will have to wait, with details of the impasse between the bidding prospective owner and the league office coming to light.
In a report on Thursday, Bill Oram of The Oregonian said that disagreements between Kirk Brown and WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert forced the league to put the expansion process on hold in the city. Oram wrote that the two disagreed on the franchise branding as well as Brown’s potential conflict of interest in owning basketball training centers around the country. The latter could be a callback to perceived advantages when New York Liberty owner Joe Tsai paid for chartered flights for his team in 2021 while other teams had travel woes flying commercial.
A source told Oram that it was Brown, not Engelbert, who pulled out of the deal because he felt that there were too many conditions for him to invest money into a team, with some harsh comparisons on how close Portland was to joining.
“Since The Oregonian/OregonLive first reported Wednesday that plans for a new WNBA franchise had fallen through, sources have equated the deal to a football team not scoring from the 1-yard line, Ben Simmons passing up an open layup and a wedding being called off right before “I do.””
The pause in moving forward with the bid is painful enough for WNBA fans in the region and around the country. Yet putting this dramatic pause in those specific sports terms is absolutely brutal.
Ideally, the addition of a Portland franchise would have taken full advantage of the popularity of women’s college basketball on the West Coast, especially in the Pacific Northwest. Though the Pac-12, for all intents and purposes, is done for after this academic year, the conference boasts six Top 25 teams in the first preseason poll. Oregon and Washington produced two of the W’s biggest stars in New York’s Sabrina Ionescu and Kelsey Plum of the two-time WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces, respectively.
Portland once had a WNBA team, as the Fire played at what’s now the Moda Center for three seasons before folding after the 2002 campaign along with the Miami Sol. The WNBA restructured its operations that year as financial troubles were too hard to overcome for some franchises.
