Is the WNBA as successful as we are being told?
League attaching strings to potential Connecticut Sun sale. The entire saga smells.
Good morning, all! It’s hump day!
I know I have been writing plenty about the WNBA recently and some of what I have written has been critical. So let me explain. I am not a critic of women’s basketball at any level. I was broadcasting women’s basketball games, before many of the protagonists in the growing Connecticut Sun saga were even born.
In 1975, I was the first to broadcast women’s high school basketball games on cable-TV in Connecticut. In the mid-90s I broadcast the games for the New England Blizzard of the American Basketball League. Yes, there was a women’s ABL. When that league was making inroads with the public, the late David Stern, NBA commissioner at the time, intervened to squash the league. His mindset was if any women’s professional basketball league was going to succeed, it had to be under the control of the NBA. The ABL folded and Stern got his women’s league. Which brings us to today and the potential sale of the Sun.
Steve Pagliuca, a minority owner of the Boston Celtics, is the leader of a group that offered $325M to purchase the Connecticut Sun from the Mohegan Tribe. The tribe accepted his bid, according to the website Front Office Sports. His intent is to move the franchise, which currently plays in an arena on the casino’s campus in southeastern Connecticut, to Boston. He made his offer within an exclusive negotiating period with the tribe. In other words, he checked all the boxes. Only problem was WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert, who earns about $3M annually, never brought Pagliuca’s bid to the league’s board of governors, according to Front Office Sports, letting the clock run out on the exclusivity time frame. Hmmm.
We learned earlier in the week that once the exclusive negotiating period expired, former Milwaukee Bucks owner Marc Lasry, a native of Morocco, who grew up in West Hartford, CT, had put together a group to buy the franchise and move it to Hartford. According to the Hartford Courant, Lasry has his own legal problems. I’ll leave you to read the Courant story on that one.
Now the website Sports Business Journal, is reporting that the WNBA doesn’t want the Lasry group to bid on the franchise either, even though his bid is in the same ballpark as Pagliuca’s. It seems the league is intent on only locating teams in cities that have submitted bids for expansion teams, something Boston and Hartford have not done. They would have to get in the back of the line behind Houston, Austin, Charlotte, Denver, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Miami, Nashville and St. Lous. That’s a pretty long line and that’s where the money part comes in.
As I wrote on Tuesday, each expansion franchise fetches the league $250M. That money is not divided up evenly per team but kept by the league to handle expenses and dole out as it sees fit. The WNBA receives nada from the sale of an existing franchise. An expansion franchise, on the other hand, nets mucho bucks.
Now, according to SBJ, the league is attaching more strings, claiming if the Sun is sold and the owners want to move the franchise, they would have to pay a franchise relocation fee. If you told me that relocation fee would be around $250M, I wouldn’t argue with you.
Saying that moving the franchise from one area of Connecticut, which is about the size of a postage stamp, to another requires a relocation fee is telling me the league needs that money to balance the books, no matter what franchise values are. For that matter, moving the team from Uncasville, CT to Boston is just a short trip up the interstate. Relocation fee? Come on, man!
IMHO the WNBA, despite all the favorable publicity it is getting from the media, may not be as financially successful as we are led to believe, particularly when you throw in looming labor problems. TV ratings are strong when Caitlin Clark plays, lukewarm at best when she does not, no matter what the media wants you to believe. The WNBA is dependent on those expansion fees, which is why it has staggered the addition of new teams each year. You cannot tell me their annual budget isn’t predicated on that $250M. Why else would the league now insist if the Sun is sold, it would have to pay a relocation fee?
But here is the final kicker. The Sun ownership, which has insisted all along it is just exploring a possible sale of the franchise, has to sell it. According to SBJ, the Mohegan Tribe is in hock up to its ears because of a failed casino enterprise in of all places South Korea.
You cannot make any of this up, but you can deduce this much. The Sun has to be sold, throwing a monkey wrench into the league’s precarious financial blueprint. In other words, the WNBA’s financials may be more smoke and mirrors than we have been led to believe.
Here are some other stories that caught my eye for Wednesday, August 6, 2025:
The New York Yankees will rue the day they traded infielder Roc Riggio to the Colorado Rockies, along with pitcher Ben Shields, for reliever Jake Bird, who was farmed out to the Yanks AAA team after two horrible outings.
The Colts are listing two number one QBs, Anthony Richardson and Daniel Jones. Now wouldn’t that be something if Jones turned out to be a hit. Just saying, Giants fans.
ESPN’s purchase of the NFL Network and its popular Red Zone is all about streaming. The flailing all-sports network is counting on streaming a lot of NFL content to bounce back. I’m reading talk of a $30 per month subscription fee.
That is going to do it for today newsletter. Thank you for your support!
DAN