WNBA is returning to Cleveland in 2028

CLEVELAND — The W is coming back to The Land. The WNBA announced on Monday that it is awarding Cleveland the league's 16th franchise. The team will begin playing in the 2028 season, nearly 25 years after the last game was played by the Cleveland Rockers. "We know Cleveland's a city with a proud basketball legacy, and we're excited for the community to embrace this team with the same passion and pride it brings to all its other professional sports teams," WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert told cleveland.com. "But it's also great to be returning to a city that helped lay the foundation for the W that we know today." The bid for a WNBA team was spearheaded by Dan Gilbert's Rock Entertainment Group, which also encompasses the Cavaliers, the Cavs' G League affiliate the Cleveland Charge, the Cleveland Monsters, and the newly-formed Rock Entertainment Sports Network. Cleveland was one of the original eight cities when the league began in 1997. In their seven-year existence, the Cleveland Rockers had four winning seasons, two losing ones and one .500 year. They made the playoffs four times. But despite winning a conference title in 1998, the team folded after the 2003 season when Gordon Gund, also the then-owner of the Cavs, could not find a new owner for the WNBA team. And while the WNBA is making a return to Cleveland, what the team will be called this time around remains to be determined. Nic Barlage, the CEO of Rock Entertainment Group, told cleveland.com they expect to know the team's name within a year. Grant Gilbert, the Vice President of Basketball and Business operations for the Cavs, will lead the name, branding and trademark charge for the new franchise. "Obviously Rockers is on the table, but ultimately we're just committed to a thorough and thoughtful process that is ultimately going to result in a brand that's incredibly reflective of Northeast Ohio and the community and all the other incredible facets of it," Gilbert told cleveland.com. "We are going to lead the process of lots of folks internally within the Rock Entertainment Group portfolio, outside agencies, fan insights," he added. "So it is going to be a very inclusive process and experience, and ultimately, we're excited for whatever comes out of it. And we know that it's going to be reflective of the pride that people have in Northeast Ohio." The team will play at Rocket Arena and will also have its own ready-made practice facility in Cleveland Clinic Courts in Independence. The Cavs will move their training facility to Cleveland Clinic Global Peak Performance Center, which is set to open in 2027 and will be located on Eagle Avenue and West 3rd street. It's the first major anchor in Dan Gilbert's plan to redevelop the riverfront around Tower City Center. The center will also serve the public on multiple wellness fronts. The 210,000-square-foot facility is slated to be one of the world's largest training facilities. Dan Gilbert will continue investing in the Independence facility for the WNBA team, which is already state-of-the-art for the league. It features two practice courts, a weight room and a theater room. "What we're going to do out at Cleveland Clinic Courts to make that facility ready-made for a WNBA team, Dan's investment in sports and entertainment infrastructure in Northeast Ohio will be just under $1.1 billion in private investment," Barlage said. "And so when you're investing that type of capital, he's always pushing us to look at what's next. "And for us, we've been thinking about professional women's sports for quite some time now. You can see it with our partnership with Tennis in the Land as well as us backing the NWSL (National Women's Soccer League) bid. "The one we really wanted internally was a WNBA franchise. And so for us, it was just aligning around the timelines and pursuing them at the right moment." The league is currently at 13 teams, the newest of which, the Golden State Valkyries, is an expansion team that began playing this spring. Toronto and Portland are the next two expansion cities and will begin playing in 2026. In addition to the league announcing Cleveland's franchise on Monday, they also announced WNBA teams coming to Detroit in 2029 and Philadelphia in 2030. So why now, and why Cleveland? It's a confluence of increased popularity and revenue. According to new valuations by Sportico, every team in the league has at least doubled in value over the past year, and are valued at $3.5 billion collectively. There's also the new 11-year media rights deal for the WNBA that will feature partnerships with Disney, Amazon Prime Video and new rights holder NBCUniversal. According to The Athletic, the deal, which will take effect in 2026, is valued at about $2.2 billion, or $200 million per year. Future agreements with additional partners could bring that number closer to $3 billion. The sport has also seen a wave of popularity in recent years, driven by talented young stars like Paige Bueckers, Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. NIL deals at the NCAA level have helped increase marketability of these individual players, and by extension, the women's game overall. Cleveland got a taste of that firsthand by hosting the NCAA Women's Final Four at Rocket Arena in 2024. "Hosting the Women's Final Four last year and the way that we saw the city just light up and was on fire about women's basketball, that really gave us a lot of confidence as we entered into this process," Barlage said. "And we were already working on it prior to that, but that was really the last thing we needed to kind of push us into what we think now is going to be the greatest professional women's sports league in the world." Last year, attendance was at its highest across the league in 24 years, improving by 48% from 2023. The league also announced that a record 24 games last regular season had more than one million viewers. Engelbert said games airing on national networks this season are averaging 1.1 million viewers per game, with viewership up about 24 percent overall when compared to 2024. "It's pretty herculean," Engelbert said of the sport's recent growth. "So that's why Cleveland's right at this time to come in because it's such a great sports city, and it's coming in as part of this confluence of all these positive elements."