The Connecticut Sun logo and the Mohegan Sun Arena logo are seen before a WNBA game between the Atlanta Dream and the Connecticut Sun on September 10, 2025. Sen. Richard Blumenthal is calling for a federal probe into the team’s impending move to Houston.
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It’s a basketball longshot that could make Braylon Mullins’ buzzer-beater knocking Duke out of the NCAA tournament look like a layup.
As he vowed last week he would do, and as I reported, Sen. Richard Blumenthal said Monday he has formally asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the pending sale of the Connecticut Sun WNBA basketball team to the owner of the Houston Rockets of the NBA. The $300 million agreement, all but certain to receive approval by the WNBA, violates federal laws that bar anti-competitive activity, Blumenthal said.
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“The WNBA has rigged the bidding. It has rigged the process to force the Connecticut Sun to be in Houston,” the Connecticut Democrat said, speaking in front of the PeoplesBank Arena in downtown Hartford, where the state would have built a $100 million-plus practice facility for the team to use.
Under the deal, reported by CT Insider and other news outlets on March 27 and announced by the Tribe on March 30, the Sun would play the 2026 season at Mohegan Sun Arena, with two home games at PeoplesBank.
Mohegan, as the tribe’s business arm is known, bought the team in 2003 and moved it from Orlando, growing it into one of the more financially successful teams in the WNBA. Mohegan put the team up for sale in the spring of 2025. By August, it received a bid of $325 million, plus a practice facility – more than it ultimately accepted from Houston – from a former owner of the Boston Celtics, to move the team to that city.
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Quickly, Gov. Ned Lamont and Marc Lasry, a Wall Street billionaire and former part-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks NBA franchise, matched the Boston bid to keep the team in Connecticut, playing in Hartford.
The WNBA, which is in effect under the control of the NBA, rejected those and other overtures, including one that would keep the team at Mohegan Sun with an outside group, recruited by the Lamont administration, owning about 30% of the team.
WNBA Commissioner Cathy Englebert said at least twice last June that the league would favor a move to Houston, which lost out to other cities including Philadelphia and Cleveland in the latest round of expansions.
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The WNBA also said, in response to the Boston bid, that the league alone holds the power to decide where teams locate.
Can the league do that? Blumenthal said the answer is no, if the league coerced the sale to Houston. I reported sources familiar with the negotiations telling me multiple times that the league did reject any sale within Connecticut – informally, because no formal offer ever came forward from Connecticut and Mohegan to the league, those sources told me.
“Everybody knows the story here,” Blumenthal said. In his letter dated Monday, April 6 to the acting head of the Department of Justice antitrust unit, he wrote, “The WNBA’s heavy hand in steering the Sun’s sale appears to be market interference so brazen it may constitute interference and bid-rigging – classic signs of monopolist behavior that should alarm the DOJ.”
A longshot hope for Fed action
If you’re playing the prediction markets, don’t bet on President Donald Trump’s DOJ to respond favorably, for several reasons.
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Tilman Fertitta, the restaurant and entertainment entrepreneur whose business owns the Rockets and made the pending bid for the Sun, also happens to be the U.S. Ambassador to Italy after he happened to give $800,000 to Trump-related PACs in the 2024 cycle. He also gave $1 million for the inauguration, where he co-hosted an event with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and others, according to multiple news stories.
Although Blumenthal is suggesting an investigation of the league, not Fertitta, asking Trump’s lawyers to probe a deal that benefited Fertitta might seem a stretch.
“I’m very clear-eyed. This antitrust department is probably the most laggard and lethargic of any in recent history. And so I’m not predicting action but I am certainly hoping that the law will be enforced.”
The Department of Justice media office did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on Blumenthal’s letter. WNBA has not commented on any aspect of the pending sale, including antitrust accusations. Mohegan declined to comment Monday.
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Separately, Blumenthal said Monday, he, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn. and Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, are proposing a bill that would guarantee smaller markets an opportunity to make offers to keep major league sports franchises.
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong suggested last September that the alleged steering of the Sun away from Connecticut by the league, which I had reported, could be a violation of state and federal laws. He demanded documents from the WNBA. But in a statement on March 30, Tong stopped short of saying he is considering a state lawsuit.
Lamont told my colleague Alex Putterman last week, referring to an antitrust action “Look, they do what they got to do but I don’t think it’s going to make any difference.”
Lamont added that he believed 90% of the reason for the league wanting a team in Houston is the TV market. It’s the largest metro area without a WNBA team although it had one from the start of the league in 1997 until that team, the Comets, folded in 2008. The other 10%? The WNBA (read: NBA) wants WNBA teams in NBA cities.
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A growing league flexes muscle
Some people believe the WNBA, with rising player salaries under a new agreement and team values in the hundreds of millions of dollars, has simply outgrown Connecticut. Blumenthal, Lamont and Tong have long argued that even though the state lacks a single, large TV market, it supports the sport strongly and is the “basketball capital of the world,” certainly for college hoops and the women’s game by virtue of UConn’s dynasties.
Blumenthal said he does not have other public officials signed onto the letter but will try to recruit some when Congress goes back into session.
Another sticking point in a possible case: Sports leagues have special protections from antitrust because in some ways of thinking about it, the leagues and not the teams are the business entity. Leagues has exemptions for labor deals with players and media deals, for example, and they have famously fought for the right to decide team locations, with mixed results.
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“I’m sure they’ll make some claim, but no, I don’t think they have an antitrust exemption for dictating that teams should go to one place or another,” Blumenthal said.
Yet another sticking point: Mohegan, which declined to comment on possible antitrust violations by the league last week and again Monday, is not making any kind of claim of wrongful steering, at least publicly.
No matter, Blumenthal said.
“All the Department of Justice needs is the facts,” he said. “I believe the Mohegan nation will cooperate in providing factual evidence. They may want some kind of compulsory process to participate. They may not want to bring the complaint themselves.”
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In short: It sure seems like what the league did stinks. Making it right could be next to impossible.