The WNBA received formal expansion applications from ownership groups in Portland, Toronto, and Philadelphia this month, with franchise valuations landing between $150 million and $175 million per bid—roughly 3x the $50 million Golden State paid for its franchise in May 2023. The league expects to vote on at least two of the three markets by March, with teams launching for the 2026 season.
Portland's bid is led by Oregon Ducks donor Phil Knight's son, Travis Knight, alongside Seattle Storm minority owner Lisa Brummel and RAJ Sports CEO Raj Bhandari. Toronto's group includes Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment chairman Larry Tanenbaum and former Raptors president Masai Ujiri. Philadelphia's application lists Sixers co-owner David Adelman and Comcast Spectacor CEO Dave Scott. All three groups filed under the league's revised ownership structure, which permits up to 15% NBA team cross-ownership and requires at least one primary governor with $500 million in liquid assets unrelated to the franchise purchase.
The valuation jump matters because it rewrites the returns profile for women's sports infrastructure. Golden State's $50 million entry—announced sixteen months ago—already looks conservative. New York Liberty sold for an estimated $120 million in January 2024, then Forbes valued the team at $145 million this week, making it the first women's franchise to crack nine figures in a published appraisal. The Liberty posted $17.5 million in revenue last season, a 42% increase over 2023, driven by sellouts at Barclays Center and local sponsorship deals that now price 20-30% above pre-Sabrina comps. That revenue multiple—roughly 8.3x—sits just below NBA expansion math, which ran 10-12x revenue when Seattle and Vegas entered at $300 million each in 2007.
The league's leverage comes from scarcity and timing. Only three franchises have changed hands since 2020, and the expansion window closes after these awards. The NBA's pending media-rights deal—expected to land near $76 billion over eleven years starting in 2025—includes a WNBA carveout that analysts estimate at $200-$250 million annually, up from the current $60 million. That number rewrites the P&L for every team. A $200 million national deal splits to roughly $13.3 million per team in a sixteen-team league, nearly 4x the current $3.5 million per team. Local rights, sponsorships, and gate revenue stack on top.
The Portland group's bid leans into Nike infrastructure. Knight owns the city's Moda Center operating rights through his animation studio, Laika, and the franchise would share the venue with the Trail Blazers. Toronto's pitch centers Rogers Centre availability and the Raptors' $250 million practice facility in Mississauga, which would host WNBA training. Philadelphia's application lists the Wells Fargo Center and a commitment to fund a dedicated 15,000-square-foot practice facility separate from the Sixers' Camden, New Jersey, campus. League sources say Toronto's cross-border tax structure is under review, but the group has already filed a Canadian corporate entity to hold the franchise.
What to watch: The WNBA board meets in late March during the NCAA tournament window. Commissioner Cathy Engelbert said the league will approve "at least one, likely two" franchises by April, with Portland and Toronto considered frontrunners. Philadelphia's bid may wait for a second expansion round in 2028-2030, when the league targets sixteen teams total. Nike's WNBA apparel deal comes up for renewal in December 2025, and bidders expect the league to push for $50-$60 million annually, up from the current estimated $15-$18 million. Liberty minority stakes are being shopped quietly to family offices at a $160 million team valuation.
The San Francisco Valkyries paid $50 million sixteen months ago. Portland's group is offering $175 million for the same asset class. That spread is the entire business case.
The takeaway
WNBA expansion bids price franchises at **$150M-$175M**, triple 2023 entry cost, as media-rights surge rewrites women's league economics.
Want the 60-second program for your specific event?
Enter your event and email — we build it and send the branded proposal before lunch. No obligation.
The branded-identity layer Chiefs of Staff and heritage CMOs route through — your name imprinted on real authorized stock, your pick of 200+ brands and 70,000 products, shipped from one accountable house. Nine editorial desks publish the intelligence those operators read before they sign.
200+authorized brands
70,000products · virtual proof on each
9 deskspublishing daily
1997one house, since
70,000 SKUs · virtual proof in 60 seconds · no platform fee · blind-shipped · ASI #217876
Your next customer won't visit your website. Their AI will.
AI assistants have quietly taken over the first step of buying — they answer from catalogs they can read and shortlist whoever can actually ship. Two questions now decide whether you exist to that buyer: can a machine read your catalog, and can you fulfill the order. Most brands fail one or both and never find out why the orders went elsewhere. The winners of this shift aren't the loudest. They're the most readable. Build for the machine that's about to do the shopping.
Built by the craft floor — apparel, media, packaging, and secure print.
This trade runs on hands, not desks. Imprint manufacturing & Komori heritage press through approved vendors · Canon high-speed secure-media operations is a craft floor — genuine Six Sigma discipline applied to ink, thread, foil, and registration, where a hundredth of an inch is the difference between a brand that reads serious and one that reads cheap. POPS4 is built by exactly those operators: independent, boots-on-the-ground engineers who carry their own book, read a client in microseconds, and put their name on every run. Beyond our own Virginia Beach floor, we work with a vetted network of craft manufacturers across the US — each meeting the highest excellence in QC standards in the industry, each a specialist in its own discipline — so apparel, hard-goods imprinting, media manufacturing, packaging, and secure printing all go to the bench built for them, coordinated from one accountable hub. Short-run from twenty-five units, volume to five hundred thousand. Two hundred authorized national brands, seventy thousand SKUs with virtual proofing on every one. Art archived for instant reorders. Net-thirty corporate terms, NDA-standard white-label — your name on the work, or none at all.
Strategy, positioning, identity, creative, and messaging — wired into an AI system that publishes and distributes on its own. Nine editorial desks generate the authority, the production house ships the physical proof, and the attribution layer tells you which post sold which SKU. What you get is an operating layer — content, catalog, and order path under one roof — that keeps working whether or not you are in the room. Built for principals who would rather own the machine than rent the agency.
Named-account programs — one desk, quiet delivery, NDA-standard.
One point of contact who already knows the file, so nothing restarts from zero between engagements. The work ships blind, under NDA, with your name on it or none at all. Built for single-family offices, heritage-house CMOs, sports-ownership groups, and the agencies that white-label our production. The relationship is the product; the merch is the proof of it.
SFO · Chief of Staff desk. Principal household, properties, aircraft, yacht, calendar, philanthropy — one file.
Shop seventy thousand products. Virtual proof on every one. 24/7.
Drop your logo on any product and see the virtual proof before asking. Quote routes direct to the desk. MCP catalog for AI agents. Celeste for the fast conversation. Full self-service checkout in development.