WNBA Commissioner Lists New Cities as Expansion Possibilities; Goal to Have 16 Teams

The WNBA will consider Philadelphia, Toronto, Portland, Nashville and South Florida as locations for expansion teams, league commissioner Cathy Engelbert announced Monday ahead of the draft, per the Hartford Courant’s Emily Adams.

Denver, among other cities and regions, will also be considered for expansion teams, per ESPN’s Alexa Philippou.

Engelbert said the WNBA has a goal of adding a new team by 2026 and wants to reach 16 teams by 2028. In October, the league announced its 13th team will play in the Bay Area, beginning in 2025.

The league originally had eight teams in its first season in 1997 but has since added four more. The two most recent WNBA teams are the Chicago Sky, who joined in 2006, and the Atlanta Dream, who joined in 2008.

Of the 12 current WNBA teams, five are associated with an NBA franchise: the New York Liberty, Indiana Fever, Los Angeles Sparks, Phoenix Mercury and Washington Mystics. The Bay Area team coming in 2025 will be affiliated with the Golden State Warriors.

With that history, Philadelphia, Toronto, Portland, Denver or South Florida could be prime candidates for expansion with NBA teams already in those locations.

But the WNBA could take a different route and expand outside an NBA market, giving a city like Nashville a professional basketball team.

The news of expansion comes ahead of a loaded WNBA draft night. Collegiate stars such as Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, LSU’s Angel Reese and Stanford’s Cameron Brink will begin their professional journeys Monday.

With so much talent coming into the league, it seems like the perfect time to expand and give players who otherwise wouldn’t make it to a WNBA roster in such a competitive field a chance to compete.

Panthers owners to fans: Team ‘lost tremendous amounts of money over the last dozen years’

Optimism generally runs pretty high as NHL training camps get set to commence, but Florida Panthers co-owners, Vinnie Viola and Doug Cifu, offered up a dose of reality in an open letter to fans on Wednesday.

As posted on the team’s website:

It is no secret that the Panthers and BB&T Center have lost tremendous amounts of money over the last dozen years. We are working hard to address this situation, which we believe we can do with the support from our loyal fans, our business partners, the business community and our community-at-large.

Elsewhere in the letter, however, Viola and Cifu reiterated their commitment to icing a competitive team and building the fan base in South Florida:

We made a commitment to the Panthers and to South Florida when we bought the team to build a successful organization on and off the ice. We have been working hard to live up to that commitment. Starting with the trade to bring Roberto Luongo, one of the world’s top goaltenders, back home to South Florida, and continuing with our committing over $80 million to new players, including bringing six talented veteran free agents to South Florida and resigning all of our restricted free agents, we have dedicated ourselves to improving the team.

Indeed, as evidenced above, it’s no secret that the Panthers are struggling financially down in Florida, and the co-owners appear to be banking on the fact that a more competitive team will breed increased viability in that particular market. 

Time will tell if that philosophy pays off, so to speak.