The WNBA is expanding to San Francisco and maybe Portland, but clearly not Philadelphia

The WNBA will expand to San Francisco, the league announced Thursday, with the new team to be owned by the NBA’s Golden State Warriors.

The new team will play games at the Warriors’ Chase Center arena in downtown San Francisco and have its own practice facility across the bay in Oakland where the Warriors used to be. Though the expansion fee hasn’t been published, Sportico reported the team’s ownership has committed $50 million in investment, a WNBA record.

“Since joining the WNBA as commissioner in 2019, I have often been asked, ‘When will the WNBA expand?’ And for the most part, my response has always been, ‘When the time is right,’” Cathy Engelbert said in a news conference Thursday at the Chase Center. “We had a lot of work to do. Well, the right time, the right moment, is today, and I’m very pleased to announce that the WNBA is coming to the Bay Area.”

Warriors co-executive chairman and CEO Joe Lacob has a history with women’s basketball, having been a founding partner in the former American Basketball League in the late 1990s. It had a team in San Jose (as well as in Philadelphia). But the WNBA quickly grew bigger after it launched in 1997, and the ABL folded a year later.

“Here we are many years later, the Bay Area is getting that team again,” Lacob said. “And for me personally, it’s a very, very exciting moment to fulfill a dream that I’ve always had for women’s basketball.”

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Late Wednesday night, NBC’s Denver affiliate reported that there would be two expansion teams announced. On Thursday morning, the well-established women’s basketball news site The Next reported that Portland would be the second team, with talks having “reached the Board of Governors level.”

There was no official word Thursday, but something seems close.

“Our goal is to have a 14th team by 2025 as well,” Engelbert said. “I’ve been traveling [to] different cities, and we’re in discussions — continued discussions, productive conversations, with several other cities.”

Asked what cities are on the board, Engelbert said, “I’ve made no secret I’ve been to Portland.” She also name-checked Sacramento, Denver, Charlotte, Philadelphia, and Toronto, the last of which drew over 19,000 fans to a preseason exhibition in May.

“There’s many cities who have reached out to us with different ownership groups, and we continue to have productive conversation with all of those cities,” she said.

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Engelbert is a Collingswood native and knows how much consumer demand there is for a WNBA team back home. But despite her words Thursday, there’s no sign of a team coming any time soon.

In particular, there’s no sign that anyone local with the right amount of money wants to spend it on a women’s sports team — whether basketball, soccer, or anything else. It’s been 15 months since The Athletic put Wanda Sykes’ name in a report about local interest and two and a half years since Natasha Cloud said something had been “in the works for a year and a half.”

Until that changes, the landscape here won’t change either.

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