The WNBA is expanding to Toronto. What does that mean for Philly?

The WNBA will expand to Toronto in 2026, the CBC reported Friday morning, capping a long effort to bring a team to the city. An announcement is expected later this month, with the league’s 14th team likely to start playing in 2026.

If you’re wondering what that means for Philadelphia’s push for a WNBA team, don’t worry. It doesn’t mean much. The city has a bid on the table, but nothing has changed since commissioner Cathy Engelbert mentioned it at the draft: it’s one of many candidates, and still no one is saying who’s behind the bid.

Toronto’s bid has been on the table for a long time, backed with big money from local billionaire Larry Tanenbaum. He’s a part-owner and chairman of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, the conglomerate that owns the NBA’s Raptors, NHL’s Maple Leafs, MLS’s Toronto FC, and other teams in the city.

Tanenbaum has been pushing for a Toronto WNBA team for some time. When the league sold out a preseason exhibition game at the city’s roughly 20,000-seat Scotiabank Arena (where the Raptors and Leafs play) last May, he already had been pushing MLSE hard to bid. But other power brokers at MLSE reportedly didn’t want to go for it.

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So Tanenbaum ended up bidding with his own company, the Kilmer Group, and that got the push over the line. The new team is expected to play in Toronto’s second-biggest pro arena, the approximately 8,000-seat Coca-Cola Coliseum.

Presumably the team also would play a few games at the big arena, but making the No. 2 venue the main home has a few benefits.

One is that once the initial buzz wears off, there will be some days when the crowd is closer to the smaller capacity than the bigger ones. It will look and sound a lot better for such a crowd to play in an arena that’s big enough to hold it, but not too big to overwhelm it.

The second is, say the average attendance in a 20,000-seat arena would be around 10,000. Sure, it’s hypothetical, but let’s say that, because it’s an exercise that any expansion bid would go through. If you play in an arena that’s a little smaller than what you could get, but you create scarcity and demand for season tickets — and more people who will watch on TV.

That’s how sports business people think, and you can be sure it’s something that whoever’s in the Philly bid would think about.

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It’s also worth mentioning that it seems to not be a coincidence that the Toronto news came out the day after the WNBA announced it will go entirely to charter flights when the regular season starts. Having that plan in place will make it much easier for teams to get across the U.S.-Canada border quickly.

Engelbert has said she wants the league, which currently has 12 teams, to be at 16 teams by 2028. San Francisco will be the 13th next year, Toronto will be the 14th, and Philadelphia is competing to be one of the following two.

The strongest candidate right now might be Portland, Ore. Though a bid fell apart last fall, the Oregonian newspaper reported Friday that two separate groups are working to get things going again.

One includes the owners of the city’s National Women’s Soccer League, the Thorns. The other has a California-based, female-led venture capital group that is behind a NWSL Boston expansion team for 2026. (One of that group’s leaders, Kara Nortman, is also big investor in the NWSL’s Angel City FC in Los Angeles.)

Could the WNBA expand past 16 teams? Perhaps in time, but the league hasn’t said anything about that yet.