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It has been a long time coming, but with the arrival of the Minnesota Lynx and Chicago Sky this weekend at Scotiabank Arena, the WNBA has finally ventured north of the border.
It won’t be the last time. But many are wondering how soon the league will be here permanently.
The league’s commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, will surely have a lot to say about that when she meets with the media on Saturday ahead of the league’s first international exhibition game.
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The 12-team league, which made its debut 19 months after the NBA’s Raptors and Vancouver Grizzlies arrived in Canada in the mid-1990s, most recently expanded in 2008 to Atlanta. The WNBA has been as large as 16 teams in the past, but some didn’t pan out and folded, while others relocated.
That shouldn’t be the case with Toronto.
It’s long past time the WNBA expanded to Ontario’s capital, one of the biggest markets in North America and one with an ever-increasing appetite for both hoops and women’s sports in general. Canada’s senior women’s team is one of the best in the world, ranked No. 5 overall by FIBA.
And while it’s no longer the case that WNBA franchises have to be affiliated with NBA counterparts in their city, as was originally the case, one would expect the deep-pocketed owners of the Raptors to be heavily involved in any pursuit of a team. Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment partnered with NBA Canada and the WNBA to co-host Saturday’s game and have investigated a bigger partnership in the past.
Engelbert again mentioned Toronto as a potential expansion target, along with others in the U.S. in an interview With Sports Business Journal last week, notably on a shorter list than what she’d spoken about when Saturday’s game was announced back in January.
“Obviously, we’re working here in the off-season on expansion. It’s one of the things I’m asked about the most by both the media and fans … I’ve said from the beginning, a league of our size and scale in a country of our size and scale, leading the women’s sports momentum, we’re going to expand at the right time,” Engelbert said on a conference call in January, also saying there were around 100 cities on the WNBA’s radar.
“I’ve talked about narrowing that, Toronto is certainly one of the names on the narrowed list,” Engelbert said then. “But we’re having conversations with several potential owner groups and many markets at this point. And we’re just excited to see the passion for the game in Canada.”
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There was a more linear pathway to NBA expansion to Toronto since the league’s forerunner actually played its first game in the city, with the Toronto Huskies hosting the New York Knicks. The NBA returned years later with the Buffalo Braves hosting a number of games for two years at Maple Leaf Gardens and many exhibition games were played either in that arena, or the then-SkyDome, including a visit from Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in 1992.
But with Canadian national team stalwarts Bridget Carleton and Natalie Achonwa in town with the Lynx (though Achonwa won’t play) and a lot of pomp and circumstance planned around the game, as Hamilton’s Kia Nurse told ESPN, this weekend can be seen as a bit of a “test run” for something that seems all but inevitable.
Pre-sale tickets for the game quickly sold out when they became available back in March. Both TSN and Sportsnet will air the game.
@WolstatSun
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