The City of Portland proudly proclaims itself “The City that Works.” However, its attempts to lure another major professional sports franchise to town have been anything but productive.
Given recent developments in the NHL, WNBA, and Major League Baseball, it’s worth wondering if the city has seen its last, best shot at landing a new franchise pass right by without even getting the ball in play.
Portland has had a long-running attempt at bringing Major League Baseball to the city, with the most recent incarnation of the effort being the Portland Diamond Project. The Project and City often seem to contradict what they want to accomplish. Portland Diamond Project recently announced it intends to purchase Red Tail Golf Course, outside the city limits and with no major mass transit hubs, and develop it into a stadium site. The city, in turn, offered to sell its Rose City Golf Course, within the city limits, only to have the Portland Diamond Project refuse the offer. A similar back and forth has been going on for over 20 years since Portland briefly flirted with the idea of landing the Montreal Expos when that team was looking to relocate. Those efforts fell through, and that team moved to Washington, DC. However, efforts to build a big-league stadium in Portland have not found much traction since then. All that occurred while Major League Baseball was desperate to find a new home for the Oakland Athletics. As a West Coast city, Portland made sense as a potential solution. Instead, one site after another has been proposed, summarily rejected, and another floated. Meanwhile, the A’s are supposed to land in Las Vegas within the next five years. Portland couldn’t even get its foot in the door as a temporary home, with that distinction going to Sacramento, where the A’s will play in a minor league stadium as a temporary home.
If Portland couldn’t find a way to land the A’s, even temporarily, it wouldn’t bode well for the city ever to land a major league baseball franchise.
As Portland continues to swing and miss at an MLB team, it took its eyes off other possibilities and appears to have missed there as well.
Unlike baseball, Portland currently has not one but two buildings that can provide a home for hockey or basketball: the Moda Center and Memorial Coliseum. While the Coliseum is indeed long in the tooth, it would provide an adequate temporary home for any team while the Moda Center undergoes upgrades. However, it looks unlikely that the Blazers will be sharing their home with another major league franchise anytime soon.
Despite the NHL now having a presence bracketing Portland on the I-5 corridor, Portland never even entered the conversation as a potential landing spot for the Phoenix Coyotes. The team has essentially been homeless in Arizona for the past several seasons, finally playing at a college arena with a capacity of 5,000 because they were literally kicked out of their former arena. Once again, a team in the western US was there for the taking, and once again, Portland could not get its head in the game. The Coyotes instead were purchased by the owners of the Utah Jazz NBA team and will begin playing in Salt Lake City next season. The NHL recently completed a round of expansion, adding teams in Las Vegas and Seattle, and doesn’t figure to be growing anytime soon. If Portland wanted to get into the big leagues in hockey, those dreams would likely have been on ice for some time.
The one spot where Portland made significant progress in getting a new team into the city recently has been with the WNBA. Portland has embraced women’s sports, with the Portland Thorns being among the most well-attended in the National Women’s Soccer League. Oregon had two women’s college teams-Oregon State and the University of Portland- make the NCAA tournament last season. The idea of a female sports bar took root in Oregon, with the first of its kind, the Sports Bra, recently announcing plans to expand. Indeed, Portland appeared to be on the cusp of landing a franchise last year when the NBA intended to expand to 14 teams. However, that became an expansion to 13 teams, with the San Francisco Bay area joining the league. Portland was supposed to be the 14th team; however, the WNBA announced that it was shelving plans for a Portland expansion due to scheduling issues with a potential Moda Center remodel. However, the situation was later revealed to be much worse than a simple scheduling issue. Instead, Kirk Brown, the millionaire founder of Zoominfo, withdrew from the ownership group just days before the team’s expansion announcement. With Brown out as the primary owner, the entire endeavor collapsed in a matter of days.
Recently the WNBA announced that it wants to expand to 16 teams by 2028. That would put a team in Portland after the Moda Center renovation is either in progress or completed, but it would still leave Portland without an ownership group. With rich moguls stepping into the breach to fill the departed Brown’s shoes, Portland has been relegated to being mentioned as one of several potential spots for expansion down the line.
Having been burned at the buzzer once before, the WNBA will likely insist on having every single “t” crossed and “i” dotted before even considering the city again. After witnessing its continuing follies to even get its foot in the door for MLB expansion and then missing a wide-open layup for the last round of WNBA expansion, that is something that the city seems endlessly incapable of doing.
If that doesn’t change quickly, there appears to be little reason for optimism of Portland bringing another big-time pro sports team to the city anytime soon.
