Welcome to the Fire Pit: Portland embraces its reborn WNBA team

The fact Portland has shown up for its new WNBA team is, in many ways, unsurprising given the city's long history of embracing women's sports.

The expansion Fire rank fourth in the league with an average attendance of about 14,500 fans per game. The only teams drawing more are the Golden State Valkyries, the New York Liberty and the Caitlin Clark-led Indiana Fever.

The Fire have dubbed the Moda Center the “Fire Pit” on game days and the team leans into the motif with pyrotechnics in game introductions.

"I think we’ve just been so fortunate, to be honest, all year to have such an amazing atmosphere here at the Fire Pit," Fire coach Alex Sarama said. "So that’s on the fan base, that’s because of this local community and just turning up and supporting the team as they do.”

Portland has long supported women’s sports. For many years, the University of Portland's soccer team had the top attendance in college soccer, spurred by national championships in 2002 and 2005 and star players like Christine Sinclair and Megan Rapinoe.

The Portland Thorns were among the founding teams of the National Women’s Soccer League in 2013 and have regularly been one of the top drawing clubs in the league.

And then there's the Sports Bra, the nation's first women's sports bar , which opened in 2022.

“We have some of the loudest fans in the WNBA,” center Megan DiLeo said. “And they’re really like our sixth man, to be honest.”

This is the second iteration of the Fire. Portland's first WNBA team started its short run as an expansion team in 2000. Portland Trail Blazers owner Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft who died in 2018, was the Fire's chairman.

Among the Fire’s original players were Jackie Stiles and Vanessa Nygaard. The team averaged some 8,600 fans per game in 2001.

So when the team folded in 2002, it was not for lack of fan support. That year the NBA, which had owned the league's teams, sold them to affiliated NBA teams or independent owners. Allen declined to buy the Fire and the team folded.

In 2024, the Bhathal family bought the NWSL's Thorns for $63 million . Later that year, Lisa Bhathal Merage and brother Alex Bhathal, under the banner Raj Sports, were awarded a WNBA expansion team .

The Bhathals invested in a joint basketball-soccer training facility, the first of its kind in women's sports, which will formally open this month.

The team leaned heavily into the “Fire Reignited” theme and has so far put on a respectable performance for an expansion franchise, ranking ninth overall in the league with a 13-19 record.

“They've done a really nice job of recognizing the past while also bringing in new fans,” said fan Laura Belfour. “There's a welcoming atmosphere and it's cool to see so many families with kids.”

Guard Carla Leite is averaging 15.5 points and 6.2 assists a game and Bridget Carleton is averaging 14.6 points and 4.4 rebounds. Carleton was the team's first pick in the WNBA expansion draft. But the team has been stung by the recent loss of guard Sarah Ashlee Barker to a season-ending ACL injury.

DiLeo and her corgi Pancake, who has her own Instagram following , have become local celebrities. Formerly Megan Gustafson before her recent marriage, DiLeo has written a children's book “Pancake's Passport” about the beloved pet's travels.

“I always heard things here and there about Portland and the women’s sports fandom that is here,” Carleton said after the team's home opener. “But never knew too much about it, especially never really being on the West Coast. But even this past week, feeling it on social media, feeling it in the city — going on a walk and people recognized me already, and I hadn’t even played a game yet. It’s just incredible.”

Sarama is the team's inaugural coach after serving as an assistant for the Cleveland Cavaliers. He practices an innovative coaching method called the Constraints-Led Approach, or CLA , which eschews repetitive drills in favor of putting players into situations that require creative problem-solving.

“I think we’re excited because I think there is a really good foundation here," Sarama said. "I think the good thing is we overachieved, but we haven’t done that at the cost of development and playing our young players. So I think what that will do is put us in a very strong position in two years and three years as we kind of add to this core group that we have.”

AP WNBA: https://apnews.com/hub/wnba-basketball