Houston Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta reached an agreement to buy the Connecticut Sun and will relocate the WNBA franchise to Houston, according to a Monday morning statement from his company, Fertitta Entertainment.
The deal is still pending league approval, but the team is expected to begin play at the Toyota Center for the 2027 season. The franchise will bring back the Houston Comets name; the Comets were one of the eight original WNBA franchises and won the league’s first four titles before shutting down in 2008 after 12 years.
The $300 million purchase price tops the $250 million expansion fee that ownership groups in Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia agreed to pay last year. It shatters the previous record control sale price for a standalone WNBA team, set when Joe Tsai and Clara Wu Tsai bought the New York Liberty for just over $10 million in 2018.
The Phoenix Mercury (2023) and Minnesota Lynx (2021) both sold as part of NBA deals, but the WNBA clubs were given little consideration by bidders at the time. It has been five years since a standalone WNBA team was sold, with the Las Vegas Aces and Atlanta Dream both trading hands in 2021. Atlanta’s price was the high seven figures for the group led by Larry Gottesdiener, while Mark Davis paid $2 million for Vegas. The Sun deal is 150x that, as investors flock to the league in hyper-growth mode.
In May, the owners of the Sun hired investment bank Allen & Company to explore the sale of the franchise. Mohegan Sun, a subsidiary of Mohegan Tribal Gaming Authority, has owned the club since it relocated from Orlando in 2003 after a $10 million fee. That sale marked the first time a WNBA team was independently owned outside of an NBA team.
The Sun play in the WNBA’s smallest media market in Uncasville, Conn., and speculation has swirled that the sale would include a franchise relocation. Connecticut’s current practice setup has drawn criticism from Sun players; the Mohegan tribe has priority at the venue, and community events have left Sun with half a court to practice on at times.
The Sun attracted bids last year from a pair of investors with deep sports ties. In August, Steve Pagliuca, who is a co-owner of Serie A team Atalanta and bid on the Boston Celtics, reached a deal with the Tribe to buy the team for $325 million and move it to Boston.
The league quickly pushed back on the agreement. “Relocation decisions are made by the WNBA Board of Governors and not by individual teams,” the league said in a statement. Former Milwaukee Bucks owner Marc Lasry, whose sports investments include the TGL, SailGP and PBR, matched Pagliuca’s price with a plan to keep the team in Connecticut with games at the renovated PeoplesBank Arena in Hartford.
During the league’s 2025 expansion announcement, commissioner Cathy Engelbert indicated that Houston, which was a finalist for an expansion team, was next in line for a W franchise.
Before 2025, the Sun had made the playoffs eight straight seasons, but the roster faced a massive turnover ahead of the season that resulted in the worst record in franchise history at 11-33.
The NBA owns 42% of the WNBA, and a finalized sale to Fertitta would mean eight of the league’s 15 teams are directly owned by NBA owners, plus the next three expansion teams, as well as two other teams (Portland, Toronto), whose owners have significant LP stakes in NBA clubs.
This month, the NBA reached a new collective bargaining agreement after months of negotiations. The term sheet calls for the league’s overall salary cap to rise to $7 million in 2026, up from $1.5 million in 2025.
The WNBA season kicks off May 8.