Portland is the newest home of the WNBA, with an expansion team set to begin play in 2026

The WNBA’s popularity is growing exponentially, and the league knows it’s time to capitalize on that and expand.

On Wednesday, the WNBA made the long-awaited official: the league will add a 15th team in Portland, which will play starting in 2026.

The Portland franchise will be owned by RAJ Sports, run by Lisa Bhathal Merage and Alex Bhathal. Lisa Bhathal Merage will serve as the controlling owner and WNBA governor. The family has experience owning professional teams, having been investors in the Sacramento Kings and are the controlling owners of the National Women’s Soccer League’s Portland Thorns (who average 18,000 fans per game).

“This is huge for Portland. We’re so honored and humbled to be the vessel that brings this WNBA franchise to Portland,” Lisa Bhathal Merage told the Associated Press. “And that’s how we see ourselves. Portland is an incredibly diverse, passionate community. We saw the passion firsthand when we started looking at the Portland Thorns and this is Basketball City. So we’re really excited about the future.”

Portland had a previous WNBA team, the Fire, that played only two seasons and folded in 2002. It has not yet been decided whether the new franchise will keep that name or adopt a new one. The team will play at the Moda Center, also home to the Portland Trail Blazers.

“As the WNBA builds on a season of unprecedented growth, bringing a team back to Portland is another important step forward,” WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert said in a statement announcing the new team. “Portland is an epicenter of the women’s sports movement and is home to a passionate community of basketball fans. By combining this energy with the Bhathal family’s vision of leading professional sports teams, we are ensuring we deliver a top-tier WNBA team to the Portland area.”

This season, 12 WNBA teams are battling it out for eight playoff spots until the final day (Thursday), but in two years, that number will grow to 15 teams in the W. The league has already announced two expansion teams — the Golden State Valkyries, which will begin play in 2025, and a Toronto franchise that will begin play in 2026 — and Portland is adding another. The league has made it clear that it is looking to add a 16th team that would begin play in 2028 (Philadelphia, Denver, Nashville and Miami are among the cities being considered).

Portland was initially expected to be announced as an expansion team last fall under a different owner, ZoomInfo co-founder Kirk Brown. However, Brown backed out late in the process, leaving the league scrambling for new owners. Engelbert blamed the change on upgrades to the Moda Center at the time, but quickly retracted those claims.

Despite the setback, the league turned to Portland because of its passion for women’s sports: the University of Oregon and Oregon State, the area’s professional sports teams like the Thorns, and it’s the city with a dedicated women’s sports bar called The Sports Bra.

“When you look at our numbers, not just the Thorns’ outsized turnout, which is incredible, what you’ve seen in Eugene, what you’ve seen at Oregon State, we knew this was going to be one of the great moments in sports for Oregon,” U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden told the Associated Press. “We saw in February of 2023 what was possible. So I can tell you right now, we have women playing in Portland. We have women rebounding in Roseburg, we have women playing basketball in Hermiston. Every corner of our state is involved in this.”