Yesterday, The Boston Globe‘s Gary Washburn reported that Boston Celtics minority owner Steve Pagliuca — fresh off losing a bid to become majority owner of the Celtics — is leading a group that will purchase the Connecticut Sun and relocate them to Boston by 2027.
This comes after months of speculation and Boston missing out on the new round of WNBA expansion. Just over three weeks ago, the Sun sold out TD Garden, home of the Celtics, when they faced the Indiana Fever. The Sun’s current owners, the Mohegan Tribe, had retained Allen & Co. to explore selling the team back in the spring. The Mohegan Tribe has operated the Sun since 2002, when the Tribe purchased the Orlando Miracle and relocated them to an arena on the grounds of the Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville, Connecticut.
While the Sun have been successful in over twenty years in Uncasville, it’s clear that the WNBA is growing out of small arenas and teams as sideshows, and with an explosion in interest in the league (and women’s sports in general) coupled with a huge spike in team valuations, clearly the Mohegan Tribe decided it was the right time to sell, and the game at TD Garden three weeks ago proved that there is an appetite for the WNBA in sports-mad Boston.
Women’s sports is in a bit of a renaissance right today, and Boston is currently on the upswing. Despite controversy surrounding its original name and marketing strategy as well as ongoing stadium issues, Boston Legacy FC is set to kick off in the NWSL next year. The Boston Fleet were one of the PWHL’s charter teams. Legacy FC explicitly wanted to “steer clear of colonial, Revolutionary War, and nautical themes,” in determining its new name, which makes sense considering Boston’s MLS team is called the Revolution and the only other pro women’s team in the city is called “the Fleet” and has an anchor as a logo. But what would a Boston WNBA team be called?
With so many pro sports teams in the greater Boston area, plus a high concentration of colleges with their own mascots, coming up with an identity for a new Boston team is no small task, as the debacle surrounding Boston Legacy FC’s initial name has shown. The Sun’s name was chosen by the Mohegan Tribe to clearly reference the Mohegan Sun Casino, so I doubt the team will retain that name in Boston. Pagliuca will not be a Celtics minority owner when the Boston Basketball Partners LLC sale to Bill Chisholm is complete, so any sort of Celtics-inspired names and identities are probably off-limits, with no chance of Washington Wizards/Washington Mystics-style identity harmony, but the WNBA has been going away from NBA-based identities in recent years anyway.
I wracked my brain trying to think of decent names for a Boston WNBA team. I came up with Sirens, due to Boston’s association with the sea, but New York’s PWHL team is already called the Sirens. I was also thinking Boston Thorns, a play on the famous Irish folk song “Boston Rose,” or Boston Morrígan, an Irish mythological figure associated with fate and war. None of those really strike me as all that good, to be honest. So I’ll open it up to the floor: what should a Boston WNBA team be called?
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