Boston is one of the flagship professional sports towns in America. The city itself – or places in its vicinity – field pro teams of all varieties.
There are the obvious ones: pro basketball, baseball, football, hockey and soccer. There’s women’s hockey, soccer, and football. Their popularity is not measured out in egalitarian doses, of course. And sadly, it’s the women’s sports that seem to fall off the radar in the minds of the average sports fan.
So, why does Boston not have a Women’s National Basketball Association franchise? That always irked me. When it comes to marketing the sport of basketball for mass appeal, what city did it better than Boston? We have the Celtics, after all, an organization just as relevant now as it was almost 70 years ago when it began a run of eight straight National Basketball Association titles (11 out of 13).
We are to pro basketball what the old Canadiens were to hockey. Our brand, our pedigree, and our long list of legends ensure that the city will always be on the basketball map.
Yet, the closest WNBA team to us is Mohegan Sun in Connecticut, home of, appropriately, the Connecticut Sun.
The Sun have a pretty interesting history. They were born in Orlando, Fla., as a sister team to the Magic. But they could not sustain themselves in Florida and the Mohegan Tribe purchased them and brought them to Uncasville. The Sun were the first pro sports team owned by a Native American tribe.
The WNBA announced it would add five more teams in the near future – none of the sites in Boston. Apparently the Hub of Basketball didn’t bid for a new team, something that seems a little suspicious to me in the light of recent developments.
All of a sudden, along comes Steve Pagliuca, former co-owner of the Celtics. His group has put down $325 million to purchase the Sun and move them to Boston.
That news broke Sunday morning (at least that’s when I heard it) and by nightfall, it seemed like fait accompli. Sun, Sun, Sun, here they come!
But wait. Not so fast . . .
There’s one huge obstacle that’s sure to slow Pagliuca’s roll. Unlike, say, the NFL, where teams can slink out of town in the middle of the night, the league has to approve all sales and all moves to relocate. And it doesn’t seem as if the league is anywhere near as interested in the Sun moving to Boston as the city is in welcoming it.
There’s no doubt the WNBA is a hot ticket commodity right now. In the last two years, the Sun have twice banged out the Garden – last month with Indiana’s Caitlin Clark in the house.
The WNBA has a stable of talent, with Clark, Paige Bueckers, Brittney Griner, Angel Reese (just to name a few). The talent and fundamental knowledge of the game that women at the college level seem to grasp have started to take hold in the WNBA. It is very good basketball – just as the Boston Fleet have helped women’s hockey take hold in the city.
Pagliuca says the Sun will play at the Garden, and, of course, vendors and businesses that usually barely survive the summers are licking their chops.
Somehow, I think this deal will get done, and that summer nights on Causeway Street will rock just as loud as they do in the other seasons.
I hope so. Boston helped put pro basketball on the map. Whatever it takes, and however much it costs, the city needs a WNBA team.
