Boston Celtics minority owner Steve Pagliuca has reached a deal to buy the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun and move the team to Boston, reports the Boston Globe.
Pagliuca and his group will pay $325 million for the team, a record-setting purchase for a WNBA franchise, with plans to relocate the team from the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Connecticut. According to the report, Pagliuca will also contribute $100 million for a new practice facility. The team plans to play its home games at TD Garden, home to the Celtics and the NHL’s Boston Bruins, and hopes to as soon as the 2027 season.
Any sale of a WNBA franchise needs to be approved by the league and the governors of each team. The league has been expanding in the past few years, with the Golden State Valykries beginning play this year. The Toronto Tempo will begin play in the 2026 season, with expansion to 18 teams by 2030, with franchises coming to Portland, Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia. There have been reports that the WNBA wants to wait until 2033 to potentially seek Boston as an expansion city for a new team.
“Relocation decisions are made by the WNBA Board of Governors and not by individual teams. As part of our most recent expansion process, in which three new franchises were awarded to Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia on June 30, 2025, nine additional cities also applied for WNBA teams and remain under active consideration,’ the WNBA said in a statement. ‘No groups from Boston applied for a team at that time and those other cities remain under consideration based on the extensive work they did as part of the expansion process and currently have priority over Boston. Celtics’ prospective owner Bill Chisholm has also reached out to the league office and asked that Boston receive strong consideration for a WNBA franchise at the appropriate time.’
The Sun has been in Connecticut since 2003, relocating from Orlando as the franchise began as the Miracle in 1999.
“I know the quickest way to get a team to Boston is for the Sun to move to Boston,” Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey told the Boston Globe. “And I don’t want to wait [until 2033]. I don’t want Boston or New England to have to wait that long. We’ve got an incredibly enthusiastic, energized base here that wants to see a ‘W’ team in Boston and to me this seems to be in everybody’s best interests.”
Mohegan Sun Arena, located inside the Mohegan Sun casino resort, seats 10,000 for basketball. In the past two seasons, the Sun played a regular-season game apiece at Boston’s TD Garden, both to sell-out crowds. The Garden has a capacity of 19,000 for basketball.
Connecticut most recently went to the WNBA Finals in 2019 and 2022 and has been to the playoffs in each of the past eight seasons, the league’s longest active postseason appearance streak. This season, the Sun have the WNBA’s worst record at 5-21.
