r/wnba • u/femaleathletenetwork • 11h ago
The WNBA Can’t Stop Dunking on Its Haters
Next May, the Houston Comets will rise from the dead after 19 years. The WNBA’s first dynasty, revived under new ownership, will play in a newly refurbished 18,000-seat arena, finally raising the jerseys of two of the greatest players of all time to the rafters, and take its place in a league that’s spent the past couple of decades transforming from an NBA side project into a mega-business.
First, though, the Comets need a locker room. And a practice court. And a weight room, a dining area, medical exam rooms, hydrotherapy pools. As of mid-August, less than nine months before the new Comets tip off for the first time, the players’ area of the Toyota Center in downtown Houston doesn’t even have bathrooms. Describing the process of bringing back the Comets as a sprint is a little like calling their original superstar Cynthia Cooper pretty good at basketball.
The original team folded in 2008, after its then-owner failed to find a buyer willing to pay $10 million. Then, in 2017, billionaire Tilman Fertitta bought the Houston Rockets and started dreaming of adding a WNBA team to match. When the W announced expansion plans in 2022, Fertitta, who runs the restaurant-casino-hotel empire Landry’s, saw his chance. His lieutenants spent years perfecting the bid, emphasizing the city’s storied history and the potential to build a billion-dollar franchise. They were “caught a little bit off guard,” according to President of Business Operations Gretchen Sheirr, to be passed over in favor of Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia. The prep work stopped.
Then, this past spring, opportunity arrived. The Connecticut Sun’s owners, the Mohegan Tribe, had put the team up for sale, and it was becoming clear that the WNBA had a specific destination in mind. League executives blocked two $325 million offers, one that would have kept the team in Connecticut and another that would have moved it to Boston. Instead, they quickly approved a $300 million bid from Fertitta, now President Donald Trump’s ambassador to Italy.
New WNBA teams generally have a couple of years to prepare. The new Comets got less than 12 months. Despite the pressure, Sheirr, who’s worked for the Rockets since 2001 and once sold tickets for the original Comets, radiates optimism. Sitting in her office wearing a cherry-red blazer with white cargo pants and white sneakers, construction noise reverberating through the windows, Sheirr can hardly control her excitement. “You know how long it takes to plan a wedding?” she asks. “However long you give yourself to plan a wedding. You want to be engaged for three years? It’s going to take you three years. You want to be engaged for three months? It’s going to take you three months. We have less than a year to launch a WNBA team, so it’s going to take us less than a year to launch it.”
The new Comets are leaping into the Pacific Ocean. The level of play is higher than ever, and so are the revenues. A new generation of players, led by Caitlin Clark, have become some of the most in-demand celebrities in the world. Houston, meanwhile, is inheriting a roster that won barely a quarter of its games last season. The ticketing office has to fill 18,000 seats for a team that may not win much. Keeping up with the most financially successful teams will require colossal corporate partnerships and marketing deals in tandem with success on the court.
The old Comets were piranha in a koi pond. They won the first four WNBA titles with three of the best players of all time on their roster: Cooper, Sheryl Swoopes and Tina Thompson. In 1998 they won 90% of their games, a record unlikely to ever be broken.
“Nobody’s expectations are any higher than the expectations that we have for ourselves,” says Sun President Jennifer Rizzotti, who will lead the basketball side in Houston. As a player, Rizzotti won an NCAA title at UConn and two WNBA titles with the original Comets. Now she’s looking forward to building the new Comets’ first roster while she looks for a place to live in Texas. “Not only are you paying a lot more for a franchise these days, but your expectation is that there’s more opportunity on the revenue side than there ever has been,” she says.
From the outside, it can look like the WNBA has been swallowed whole by culture-war fights, most notably this summer’s uproar — instigated by an Indiana Fever benchwarmer but stoked by the media — over the hypothetical scenario of a trans woman playing in the league. Egged on by a handful of internet provocateurs, multiple fans were arrested for throwing sex toys onto the court during games, a stunt that had begun in 2025 as part of a campaign for a cryptocurrency memecoin but later became part of the anti-trans protests. Fox News devoted 206 individual segments to women’s basketball in less than two months, many of them including a disclaimer that the hosts have no interest in discussing the sport. “Absolute chaos,” the Wall Street Journal dubbed this season, in an article that didn’t quote a single player, coach or front-office employee from any team.
Commissioner Cathy Engelbert and other league executives have largely stayed quiet on the matter, upsetting many fans who see an opportunity to take a progressive stand. A memo from Engelbert to players in early August called the question of trans athletes in women’s sports “complex and nuanced” without endorsing specific eligibility criteria. In late August, Engelbert finally spoke publicly but still stopped short of taking an official position on the issue, saying “people are trying to use the league to sow divisiveness” and adding “that’s what happens when you have made it as a legitimate sports media and entertainment product.” Many pundits on all sides erroneously named the whole debacle as the reason why Engelbert announced last month that she’s retiring at the end of the year. The basketball had never been better, but all anyone wanted to talk about was a player who didn’t exist.
Around the league, though, the protests and counterprotests and stunts and commentary are treated like a minor annoyance, an aggravating yet benign side effect of assuming a bigger stage and much, much bigger valuations. WNBA revenue has surpassed where the NBA was at the same point in its existence, even when adjusted for inflation, and a $281 million media rights deal has put its games and drama in front of millions more people. The season will expand from 44 to 50 games in 2027; by 2030, the league will have 18 teams. For decades, owning a pro women’s basketball team meant playing in rinky-dink arenas, flying coach between games and paying salaries that started at $66,000. Suddenly, competing in the WNBA requires best-in-class facilities, charter flights, and large teams of trainers and physical therapists; nonbasketball offerings like rooms for nursing mothers and makeup studios are becoming increasingly standard. All this to say, the W is treating the screaming activists like one more symptom of its resounding success.
Renderings of the Comets’ remodeled space, stripped of the team logo and colors to preserve the suspense ahead of a November unveiling, show a locker room with plush carpet and cushy chairs, an elegantly lit “vanity area” and a dining space that will have a designated pickup zone for each player’s go-to smoothie or snack. The cinderblock walls that lead from the locker room to the main arena will be lined with life-size photos of great moments in Comets history, then redecorated to display Rockets memorabilia during the NBA season. And though the trend in the WNBA is to build standalone practice facilities, the Comets don’t have time for that. Instead, they’re kitting out a bare-bones court and storage area into a professional-quality practice space and weight room.
On this characteristically scorching mid-August day, none of that exists in Houston. Carving out space for the Comets required rearranging the Rockets’ facilities too, so neither team has a locker room at the moment, less than two months before the men’s squad starts preseason play. A tour of the renovation zone gives the sense of controlled chaos. As soon as one crew hangs a sheet of drywall, another swoops in to paint it. Another group takes a lunch break sitting in the players’ shower stalls, which don’t yet have plumbing, much less tile. Leah Mastaglio, the vice president of arena operations, wears a hard hat with a “Dumpster Fire Response Team” sticker.
For all this, the vibes around the Toyota Center are exuberant. Everyone involved seems almost giddy that they’re the ones who get to bring back the winningest team in WNBA history at a key moment in the league’s growth. Team executives know everyone around the league is watching what they do, watching to see whether Fertitta’s $11 billion can build a WNBA juggernaut and electrify the fourth-largest city in the country or not. The Comets, in turn, have their eyes on the most successful existing franchise, one just two years older than they are. As Cooper, the four-time MVP from the original Comets dynasty, puts it: “We want our own Ballhalla.”
