I didn’t want to go too long without writing about a major women’s sports story from the last few weeks. That story is the fact that the Connecticut Sun of the WNBA has been sold to a group of Texas investors with the purpose of moving the franchise to Houston.
The league’s social media presence has proclaimed the fact that the Houston Comets are the likely rename of the team when it takes to the court in 2027.
This has to be a moment of equal parts comfort and unease for the people who run the WNBA. For the early part of the WNBA’s history, the teams were owned by NBA franchises. It was during that time that the Comets, thanks to their Big Three of Sheryl Swoops, Cynthia Cooper, and Tina Thompson, won the first four WNBA championships.
But when WNBA ownership started transitioning to local groups and entrepreneurs, the Comets found themselves without an owner when the Great Recession of 2008 led to the franchise’s folding.
Now, it was that time period when different models of WNBA ownership were being studied. This included proposals to put franchises in markets where women’s college basketball was strongly supported. One of those locales was the state of Connecticut. The University of Connecticut played its home games in Storrs, and would play some of their key interconference games in Hartford, which is a 30-mile trip up the interstate.
The time for the WNBA to test that business model was 2003, when the Orlando Miracle was moved to the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Conn. The team remained in the arena for more than a quarter of a century, but never managed to win a WNBA title.
In a sudden move last month, the owners of the Houston Rockets of the NBA announced that they had agreed to purchase the Sun and move them to Houston.
There was a lot of discussion afterwards about whether Boston could have made a play for hosting the Connecticut franchise, given the variety of locales available, whether in Boston, Worcester, or a number of locales in between. Indeed, there had been reports that a minority owner of the Boston Celtics was interested in purchasing the Sun and relocating it to TD Garden.
It does bring up an interesting problem: would Boston be the same kind of long-term women’s basketball market as mid-Eastern Connecticut? I mean, there were some good crowds at the Mohegan Sun Arena when the Sun were in the playoffs and when the WNBA All-Star Game was there four times between 2005 and 2015.
I guess we won’t find out until after 2030, which is the latest point in the future for WNBA expansion.