The WNBA is headed to the Metropolis of Roses.
Portland was awarded the WNBA’s fifteenth franchise, the league introduced Wednesday. The franchise, which is able to start play in 2026, is led by Lisa Bhathal Merage and Alex Bhathal, the house owners of the Nationwide Ladies’s Soccer League’s Portland Thorns.
The workforce will play within the metropolis’s downtown enviornment, the Moda Middle, which can be house to the NBA’s Portland Path Blazers.
“We imagine within the transformative energy of ladies’s sports activities and are thrilled that the W will name Portland house,” Lisa Bhathal Merage said in a statement. “We all know that Portland’s vibrant and various communities will extremely assist and rally round this workforce. Our purpose is to develop this group in partnership with the Portland neighborhood and we look ahead to supporting the most effective ladies’s basketball gamers on the planet after they take the ground on the Moda Middle in 2026.”
