Former Boston Celtics minority owner Steve Pagliuca agreed to buy the Connecticut Sun from the Mohegan Tribe for $325 million with plans to relocate the team to Boston within two years. The team's outgoing and incoming ownership groups approved the arrangement, but the WNBA publicly opposed the sale. The league prefers to steer any relocation and expansion directly and views a sale as likely leading to a move to a larger market. The Mohegan Tribe has operated the Sun since 2003 and seeks maximum proceeds and to keep the team in New England. The WNBA requested that Dan Gilbert's Cleveland group submit a bid before opening the sale broadly.
Two weeks ago, news broke that former Boston Celtics minority owner Steve Pagliuca had agreed to a deal with the Mohegan Tribe to buy the WNBA's Connecticut Sun for $325 million, with plans in place to relocate the team to Boston within two years. While the team's outgoing and incoming ownership groups were happy with the arrangement, the WNBA was not. The league, which released a frosty statement at the time, clearly had another idea in mind to resolve the Sun's situation.
A new report from ESPN's Alexa Philippou and Ramona Shelburne offers a ton of interesting details showing how the league plans to manage expansion over the coming decade. While a franchise sale in any major North American professional sport has to be approved by some constituency of the other owners, it's rare for a league to step in like this and publicly oppose a proposed deal, especially for a record-breaking price.
Pagliuca led one of the groups that lost out in the recent sale of the Celtics, and while his proposal did not mention Boston specifically, he hasn't been subtle about his desire to move the team there and spend $100 million on a new practice facility. The city has hosted two sold-out Sun games in the past two years, both of which WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert has attended.
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