{"id":568662,"date":"2026-03-29T13:10:21","date_gmt":"2026-03-29T13:10:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/568662\/"},"modified":"2026-03-29T13:10:21","modified_gmt":"2026-03-29T13:10:21","slug":"the-wnba-is-returning-to-houston-as-fertittas-buy-connecticut-sun","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/568662\/","title":{"rendered":"The WNBA is returning to Houston as Fertittas buy Connecticut Sun"},"content":{"rendered":"

The WNBA <\/a>is coming back to Houston.<\/p>\n

The Connecticut Sun are being sold to the Fertitta family, which also owns the NBA’s Houston Rockets, a person with knowledge of the deal confirmed on Friday.<\/p>\n

An official announcement is expected soon.<\/p>\n

The deal, which had been discussed since December,<\/a> will be for $300 million, ESPN and the Connecticut Insider reported. The team will play its final seasonn in Connecticut in 2026 before moving to Houston. The deal’s finalization was first\u00a0reported on Friday by Paper City Magazine.<\/p>\n

The Houston Comets were one of the WNBA’s original eight teams when the league started in 1997. They won the first four league championships<\/a> behind stars Cynthia Cooper, Sheryl Swoopes and Tina Thompson \u2014 all three are in the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame.<\/p>\n

Team owner Hilton Koch put the team up for sale in 2008 but didn’t get offers, leading the WNBA to take over the team and disband it in December 2008.<\/p>\n

When Houston was left out of the WNBA’s latest round of expansion in June,\u00a0 commissioner Cathy Engelbert praised Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta as \u201ca great supporter of the WNBA\u201d<\/a> and said the league will \u201cstay tuned\u201d on possibly bring a franchise back Houston.<\/p>\n

Fertitta and the Rockets were in the running for an expansion team, but the league opted to go with Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia instead, with all three ownership groups paying a $250 million expansion fee.<\/p>\n

The Sun has been a franchise in flux with the Boston Globe reporting in August that the owners of the Boston Celtics planned to buy the team for $325 million and move it to Boston. The Hartford Courant also reported that Marc Lasry, who formerly owned the Milwaukee Bucks, was interested in making a bid for the team and would move it to Hartford. However, the WNBA will not allow teams to relocate without input from the league, which effectively blocked those potential deals.<\/p>\n

The Connecticut Sun, which has been owned by the Mohegan tribe since 2003 when it purchased the Orlando Miracle for $10 million and moved the franchise, had been one of the WNBA\u2019s most successful teams, making a run of eight straight postseason appearances before losing its entire starting lineup and finishing 11-33 this season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The WNBA is coming back to Houston. The Connecticut Sun are being sold to the Fertitta family, which…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":568663,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[49,48,82,630],"class_list":["post-568662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568662"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568662\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/568663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}