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Nearly 8,000 fans at Mohegan Sun Arena saw the Connecticut Sun play the Phoenix Mercury on June 25, 2025. Phoenix won 83-75. The Sun would move to Houston under a tentative deal expected to be signed early in the week of March 30, 2026.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Dan Haar\/Hearst CT Media <\/p>\n
US Sen. Richard\u00a0Blumenthal, foreground,\u00a0 and\u00a0 Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, left, are pushing for answers and a possible investigation of the likely sale of the CT Sun WNBA basketball team to the owners of the Houston Rockets.\u00a0 They are shown with Gov. Ned Lamont at the Capitol immediately after the election of President Donald Trump in November, 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jim Michaud\/Hearst Connecticut Media<\/p>\n
You might wonder why the\u00a0Mohegan Tribe accepted $300 million from a Houston group<\/a> for the Connecticut Sun<\/a>\u00a0WNBA basketball team instead of $325 million from at least two different buyers in New England, both also offering to build a $100 million practice facility.\u00a0<\/p>\n And you might wonder how all of us looking closely at the deal reported months ago, long before the Houston talk<\/a>s even began, that the team would most likely\u00a0move to that Texas city<\/a> under the same ownership as the NBA Rockets franchise.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n If you’re really following this move, you might also wonder why the\u00a0WNBA would not allow Mohegan, as the tribe’s business arm is known, to bring in even so much as a minority investment partner <\/a>for one-third of the team, to keep the Sun in Connecticut playing in the same Mohegan Sun Arena.\u00a0<\/p>\n If you think all of that reflects market manipulation by the league in steering the team toward one buyer in one city \u2013 manipulation that might violate federal and state antitrust laws \u2013 you have company in two top Connecticut elected officials.<\/p>\n “The outcome here clearly seems to have resulted from the WNBA favoring one bidder,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal told me. “The WNBA put its thumb on the scale and exercised its power for its own interests.”<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Make CT Insider a preferred source on Google to see more of our journalism when you search.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Add Preferred Source<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Blumenthal dubbed it “anticompetitive interference” in a weekend post on X. He’s calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the deal under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, still the standard for upholding fair competition in the business world.<\/p>\n “Let the market decide who wins the bidding competition, not the\u00a0WNBA,” Blumenthal said Sunday.\u00a0<\/p>\n William Tong, the Connecticut Attorney General, also wants answers. In a weekend email from his office after the UConn men’s team made a miracle comeback against Duke, he called the deal “concerning,” especially since the sale is “at a price far less than what was on the table to keep them here at home.”<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Under the deal that I reported Friday along with ESPN and PaperCity Magazine, and was\u00a0announced publicly Monday<\/a>, the team would play one last season in Connecticut this year, then move to Houston in 2027.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Blumenthal and Tong both brought concerns about the sale<\/a> to WNBA Commissioner\u00a0Cathy Englebert way back in September, after it became clear in reports by me and other journalists that Houston was the favored destination and that the league was not going to allow a sale within Connecticut.<\/p>\n Tong demanded documents<\/a> on league rules and team valuations from Englebert. He reviewed those and said in the email Sunday that his office is “consulting with our partners in state government and local leaders.”<\/p>\n An inquiry in Congress is also possible. Blumenthal, the ranking Democrat on the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said he can’t assure that will happen, for several reasons. “It could be part of a broader investigation but we need to first assess whether there is sufficient evidence in this case and in others,” he told me.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Mohegan, through a spokesperson, declined to comment Monday on whether the league steered it improperly to Houston. A WNBA spokesman did not respond to my emailed request for comment.<\/p>\n Deal fails the smell test<\/p>\n We\u00a0get that sports teams and corporations often exit Connecticut. But like the old Hartford Whalers hockey squad<\/a> of the\u00a0NHL in 1997 or more recently, the Bridgeport Islanders announcing they will decamp to Canada <\/a>after 25 years here, the team’s owner making a choice is one thing; having it forced upon them by their leagues is altogether different.\u00a0<\/p>\n This Connecticut Sun sale fails the smell test.\u00a0Blumenthal and Tong, often accused of having overactive lawsuit trigger fingers, are right to see where inquiries might lead.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n But the route to proving anti-competitive behavior, especially when it comes to sports leagues, is long, tricky and complex.<\/p>\n A related fact, maybe meaningful and maybe not, the Rockets’ owner, multi-billionaire entertainment entrepreneur\u00a0Tilman Fertitta, happens to be a major donor to President Donald Trump and is currently the U.S. Ambassador to Italy. Don’t wait up at night for Trump’s Justice Department to investigate the league that handed him a team.<\/p>\n Mohegan bought the team from Orlando in 2003 and put it up for sale in the spring of 2025. By August it had a $325 million offer from a former Boston Celtics part-owner <\/a>in that city \u2013 which the league rejected, saying it, and not individual owners, gets to decide where WNBA teams can move.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mohegan then saw the light and decided to work within Connecticut, where the tribe has always been a strong economic partner. Marc Lasry, a former part-owner of the NBA Milwaukee Bucks who grew up in West Hartford and has a home in Westport, matched the $325 million offer <\/a>and Gov. Ned Lamont agreed to build a practice facility. The team would play in Hartford at the PeoplesBank Arena.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Nothing doing, the league said. Likewise, the league signaled it would reject a $100 million sale of a 30 percent stake, which would not move games from the\u00a0Mohegan Sun Arena.\u00a0<\/p>\n Houston, the nation’s 5th largest metro area, the biggest TV market without a WNBA team, is where the league wanted the Sun to move<\/a>. Aside from my hearing that through sources, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Englebert <\/a>said it in plain English last June.\u00a0<\/p>\n And the NBA, which created and still controls the WNBA, is moving back to having WNBA teams as co-owned affiliates<\/a> of NBA teams, ESPN and others have reported.<\/p>\n In the league’s defense, Houston was the home of the Comets in the WNBA, which won the first four league titles in 1997-2000 but folded in 2008. And\u00a0Fertitta did put in a bid for an expansion team, losing out to several other cities as the league grows rapidly.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n But did Mohegan have any say in where it sold the team? It appears to have only negotiated with Fertitta after the league derailed the tribe’s attempts to stay in New England.<\/p>\n “There is a potential for anti-competitive behavior,”\u00a0Blumenthal said, “which at least merits an investigation.”<\/p>\n ‘The heart and soul of women’s basketball’<\/p>\n It’s a safe bet the WNBA league office and board of governors\u00a0will bless this deal. If the facts are as they appear,\u00a0Blumenthal said, “I am hoping we may take some action this week” in formally requesting a Department of Justice inquiry.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n This is familiar territory for the senator, who routinely attacked alleged anti-competitive and unfair business behavior as Connecticut’s attorney general from 1991 to 2011. In fact, in 2003, Blumenthal, on behalf of UConn, co-led a lawsuit against\u00a0the Atlantic Coast Conference <\/a>and several universities, claiming they violated the rights of UConn<\/a> and the Big East when they reorganized the ACC.\u00a0<\/p>\n That lawsuit, which ended in a settlement, angered a lot of folks in the sports world. But it made the point that powerful leagues are not above laws regulating competition.\u00a0<\/p>\n This time around, last September, Tong and Blumenthal both wrote bluntly to Englebert, with Tong saying the steering was “anti-competitive and may violate state and federal law.”<\/p>\n “Connecticut is the heart and soul of women\u2019s basketball. There would be no\u00a0WNBA without the players, coaches and dedicated fan base in and from Connecticut,” Tong wrote in his statement over the weekend.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n U.S. action is a\u00a0longshot<\/p>\n Even setting aside\u00a0Fertitta’s connection to Trump, federal action looks like a\u00a0longshot. The trend in recent decades under Democrats and Republicans alike has been a loosening of antitrust enforcement; and under Trump, it’s all about favors for people who advance his agenda.<\/p>\n Just last month Gail\u00a0Slater, Trump’s appointed head of the Justice Department antitrust division, was forced out in part because her bosses had to rein her in\u00a0on key merger cases, according to published reports and\u00a0angry responses from Senate Democrats<\/a>.<\/p>\n Another barrier: Major\u00a0leagues in professional sports have exemptions for some anti-competitive activity, notably broadcast deals and labor relations because, the argument goes, the leagues and not the individual teams are the business. Obviously, it’s a hybrid. The leagues have generally tried to use their muscle to prevail over team moves, with mixed success.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n<\/p>\n