The increasingly contentious sale of the Connecticut Sun WNBA team isn’t quite a stadium or arena story, not just yet, but it may yet get there, and it’s so weird that it’s worth looking at anyway, so let’s dive in. The story so far:
- 2003: The Orlando Miracle are purchased by the Mohegan Indian Tribe and relocated to Uncasville, Connecticut, to be the primary tenant of the arena at the tribe’s Mohegan Sun casino.
- May 2025: Mohegan Sun hires an investment bank to put the Sun franchise up for sale, because apparently the casino doesn’t need a primary tenant anymore as badly as it could use the proceeds from selling a now-valuable WNBA team.
- August 2, 2025: Boston Celtics minority owner (and chair of Bain Capital, which formerly took over a South Korean casino resort after Mohegan defaulted on it) Steve Pagliuca reached a deal to buy the Sun for $325 million and move the team to Boston, where the team would play in TD Garden with the Celtics and Pagliuca would build a new $100 million practice facility.
- August 4, 2025: Former Milwaukee Bucks owner Marc Lasry said he was also preparing a $300 million–plus bid for the Sun, and would move the team to Hartford’s arena.
- August 5, 2025: The WNBA declared that cities that had bid for expansion teams would get first dibs on relocating teams as well, and since “no groups from Boston applied for a team,” cities that lost out on expansion bids — which could include Houston, Charlotte, St. Louis, Kansas City, Austin, Nashville, Miami, and Denver — “have priority over Boston.” The same would go for Hartford, which likewise didn’t submit an expansion bid.
This is … nuts? I’m going to go with nuts. Hartford and Boston didn’t bid for an expansion franchise for obvious reasons: New England already has an WNBA team, which is the Sun. (It’s about a 45-minute drive from Uncasville to Hartford; Boston is more like an hour and a half.) Even calling a move from Mohegan Sun to Hartford a “relocation” feels like a stretch: When the New York Liberty moved from Madison Square Garden to White Plains and then to Brooklyn those were arguably more significant moves, but nobody at the league suggested that the team be put up for bid to move to Austin or Nashville.
While I have no inside information, the three most likely explanations seem to be that either: 1) the WNBA is trying to assert its control over where its teams play, possibly in order to extract the biggest bids in terms of sale price and arena offers (there’s the Field of Schemes content you’ve been waiting for!), 2) the WNBA is hoping to keep the Sun in Connecticut somehow somewhere while also adding a Boston franchise (as the Boston Globe reported could happen, citing a “WNBA source”) or 3) someone in WNBA leadership really doesn’t like Pagliuca for some unknown reason. In the meantime, Sun president (and former UConn and New England Blizzard star) Jennifer Rizzotti says the team will remain in Uncasville for the 2026 season, while we wait to see who if anyone gets to steal the Sun.