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Why doesn’t Boston have a WNBA team?
“I know we'd have tons of fans and huge interest here," Gov. Maura Healey said.
With loads of titles and diehard fans, Boston is undoubtedly a sports town.
Most recently, the city turned into a sea of green for a celebratory parade after the Celtics won their 18th banner in June.
But despite this zeal for sports, there has never been a WNBA team in the Boston area.
Why is that? And will it ever change?
The WNBA comes to TD Garden
This summer, a WNBA game was held at TD Garden in Boston for the first time, as the Connecticut Sun and Los Angeles Sparks faced off before a sold-out crowd.
“Hopefully this isn’t the last,” Sun star DiJonai Carrington said following the game. “Hopefully this is the first of many.”
Ceyda Mumcu, the sports management chair at the University of New Haven, told Boston.com she thinks the league is “experimenting” through these one-off games in different locations to see how the markets react.
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“Seeing a sold-out game in a larger arena and engagement from the local fan base is an incredible signal,” she said of the TD Garden game. “I think it is certainly showing that Boston could be a viable market for an [expansion] team.”
The 12-team WNBA, founded in 1996, is “far ahead” of the NBA, founded nearly 50 years before, at the same point in its product lifecycle, Mumcu said.
“When we compare the WNBA with the NBA timeline, the league is still doing a phenomenal job in generating revenue, pursuing growth these days, especially in the last couple of years,” she said.
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A Celtics spokesperson said the team is excited about the “positive momentum” that women’s basketball and the WNBA are experiencing, and it’s “especially thrilled with the ongoing success of the Connecticut Sun.”
“The sold-out Sun game at the TD Garden was one of many magical moments New England basketball fans have enjoyed in 2024, and we hope a WNBA Championship adds to this most special year,” the spokesperson told Boston.com (the Sun play the Minnesota Lynx in a pivotal Game 5 Tuesday night). “We will continue to root for the Sun in their championship chase, and look forward to even more collaboration in the years to come.”
Could the Celtics own a Boston WNBA team?
Seven of the current WNBA teams share an arena with an NBA team, and five teams share ownership with their NBA counterpart: The Indiana Fever (Pacers), Minnesota Lynx (Timberwolves), New York Liberty (Nets), Phoenix Mercury (Suns), and Washington Mystics (Wizards).
When the league first started in the 1990s, the then-Celtics owners were not interested in owning a team, late NBA commissioner David Stern told the Athletic in 2019.
“There was very little enthusiasm by ownership at that time for a WNBA team in Boston. They were not interested,” Stern, who spearheaded the founding of the WNBA, said. “There was enormous enthusiasm for other teams in the early years, and Boston was not one of the teams that demonstrated that enthusiasm.”
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Val Ackerman, current commissioner of the Big East Conference and the first president of the WNBA, remembered things similarly.
“My recollection was that Boston was not interested,” she told the Athletic. “[The Celtics] didn’t want to invest because they had too much going on on the men’s side.”
Last year, Celtics owner Wyc Grousbeck hinted at the possibility of a Boston WNBA team in the future.
“There’s some discussions underway,” he said at Axios BFD in New York last October. “Stay tuned, but I’m not sure. I’ve heard some rumblings.”
However, Celtics ownership does not own TD Garden (the Bruins do), which Grousbeck said could pose a problem if the group added a new franchise.
“I’ve been open to it all along, except that it just doesn’t work out as well if you don’t own the building,” he said.
The Celtics’ ownership group announced in July its plans to sell shares of the team, but Grousbeck is expected to stay in his current role as team governor until 2028.
Other ownership options
In today’s world, things are different, Ellen J. Staurowsky, a sports media professor at Ithaca College, recently told Boston.com.
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“I think we are growing into a new era of women’s sports being taken seriously,” she said. “The plain fact of the matter is that if you are a professional working in the sports industry, and you don’t take women’s sports seriously, you’re really overlooking an opportunity there in terms of both potential investors as well as audience.”
And even if the Celtics don’t invest in a franchise, there are alternative routes the WNBA could take to get a team in Boston.
“The Boston Celtics may own a WNBA team surely, but it could also be a private entity,” Mumcu said. “A individual may own a team.”
As for the Connecticut Sun, the Mohegan Tribe bought the Orlando Miracle in 2003, becoming the first Native American tribe to own a professional sports team. That team was then renamed the Sun and relocated to Uncasville, Connecticut. The team is now managed by Mohegan Sun and plays home games inside the Mohegan Sun Arena.
More locally, Boston’s new National Women’s Soccer League expansion team, Boston Unity Soccer Partners (coming in 2026), is led by an all-female ownership group. (Boston Globe Media CEO Linda Henry is an investor in the team. Boston.com is part of Boston Globe Media.)
Through a public-private partnership with the city, the team is aiming to pitch into renovation costs for Franklin Park’s White Stadium, so it can host games and practices there. The stadium would also still be used for Boston Public Schools events.
“That’s a whole new, different way of funding women’s sports, with women entrepreneurs taking leadership, seeing the value, and making things happen in communities that people didn’t think could happen,” Staurowsky said.
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As the barriers to female participation in sports are coming down, Staurowsky said the new challenge is how to promote equity between men and women’s sports.
“We’re now saying, ‘OK, we’re not fighting for participation anymore,’” she said, “but now we want to have an equal playing field, and what’s that going to look like?”
What lies ahead
The WNBA, which is in the midst of its playoffs, is set to add new franchises in San Francisco, Toronto, and Portland, Oregon, in the coming years. The expansion comes amid increased WNBA popularity, with its ticket sales and viewership on the rise in recent years.
Late last month, when the Portland team was announced for 2026 (with Raj Sports reportedly paying $125 million for the franchise), WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert said she hopes for even more teams by 2028 — but she didn’t think any additional teams would start playing before 2027.
If Boston were to get a team, it’d have a fan currently in the state’s highest office.
“I wish we had [a WNBA team] here already,” Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, a former collegiate and professional basketball player herself, recently told Boston.com in a statement. “I know we’d have tons of fans and huge interest here — in the state where both the women’s and men’s game was invented. I’d love to see this.”
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