Golden State Warriors will have a women’s team
The Bay franchise will enter the WNBA with an associated franchise. The North American League will expand to 14 teams.
Golden State Warriors continue their growth. The Bay team has become one of the great engines of world basketball in recent years due to its sporting successes (seven rings, four in the last nine years) and also for its economic successes: in 2022, the franchise had a value of $7,000 million with an annual revenue of $765 million plus income of $150 million between sponsorship arrangements and advertising at the Chase Center, the base the Warriors moved to in 2019 from Oakland.
WNBA expansion
A constant, enviable growth that will have a new chapter with its immersion in the WNBA. According to The Athletic, Golden State will put the final seal on its arrival in San Francisco with an affiliated team, that will also play at the Chase Center, in the women’s national basketball league, which intends to expand from the current 12 franchises to 14. The number 16, the maximum number of teams the WNBA has had in 2000, is the dream number. Although further expansion is not ruled out. The last team to appear in the League was the Atlanta Dreams in 2008, 15 years ago.
The last two franchises that united both leagues were Charlotte with the Sting and Portland with the Fire. The first had a life of nine years (1997-2006), while the second, only two: 2000-02.
The Bay area, San Francisco, has always been one of the targets of the WNBA, which currently has only one team, the Los Angeles Sparks, in California. Additionally, women’s basketball has a strong fan base due to the Stanford and Cal college programs.
The WNBA was founded in 1997 with eight teams. A figure that increased to 16 in 2000 and that lasted until the disappearance of three teams between 2002 and 2003 - Miami Sol, Portland Fire and Cleveland Rockers. Then, the light which Charlotte Sting, Houston Comets and Sacramento Monarchs brought to the competition was extinguished. Only seven of those 16 teams remain in the cities where they were founded and three of them had to change location.
A number of teams that the North American League wants to recover to grow, to stop losing valuable players, focusing on the 2024 and 2025 drafts: Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers, Angel Reese, Aneesah Morrow... stars capable of changing the fate of an institution.
The moment for expansion, furthermore, seems propitious due to the growing interest in women’s basketball that will have an impact on the negotiations for a new television agreement scheduled for after the 2025 season and on the increase in the value of the franchises.
At the beginning of the year, the Seattle Storm were valued at $151 million, a figure determined when the organization’s ownership group sold minority shares to finance a new training facility. Taking into account that the most anyone is believed to have paid for a franchise in the past was approximately one tenth of that valuation… that deal seems very good.