The WNBA made a groundbreaking announcement on Monday morning, saying that the league will have 18 teams in operation by 2030 in another round of expansion. For Denver sports fans looking to have a WNBA team in the city, they will have to wait even longer than that as the bid put in by an investment group led by the Dimond family was not a winner.
🚨HISTORIC MOMENT ALERT🚨
The W is leveling UP — three new teams, three new cities, one unstoppable future. ⭐
Say hello to our newest expansion teams:
🟣 @clevelandwnba – coming 2028
🔵 @DetroitWNBA – coming 2029
🔴 @philawnba – coming 2030
New energy. New legacies. New era.… pic.twitter.com/6ZXaHPxkEw
— WNBA (@WNBA) June 30, 2025
Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia were the three cities with the winning bids, with teams in those cities set to kick off play in 2028, 2029 and 2030, respectively.
“The demand for women’s basketball has never been higher, and we are thrilled to welcome Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia to the WNBA family,” said Cathy Engelbert, the commissioner of the WNBA. “This historic expansion is a powerful reflection of our league’s extraordinary momentum, the depth of talent across the game, and the surging demand for investment in women’s professional basketball.”
Why not Denver? The city has shown this decade that they are more than just Broncos fans with their unconditional support for the Denver Nuggets throughout the peak of the Nikola Jokic era, and the fans have also shown their want for women’s professional sports in town with the support of the Denver NWSL franchise that’s set to begin play in 2026 down in Centennial. The investment group also has plenty of wealth, with Ashley Dimond, Stonebridge CEO Navin Dimond and Ibotta CEO Bryan Leach, who has forked over plenty of money in the basketball world to be the official jersey sponsor of the Denver Nuggets.
The group also expressed that, if selected, the franchise would not have played its games at Ball Arena, but rather at a purpose-built arena, similar to the NWSL franchise.
At a press conference before the WNBA Finals last October, Engelbert stated that there are a multitude of factors that the league takes into consideration when deciding which city deserves to be awarded an expansion team. She said that the league’s emphasis is “around arena, practice facility, player experience, committed long-term ownership, city demographics, psychographics, Fortune 500 companies based [in the potential cities].”
Another aspect of Denver missing out on the bid this time around is that the ownership group doesn’t have the NBA ties of the other three groups. The Detroit franchise will be owned by Tom Gores, who currently owns the Pistons, the Cleveland franchise will be led by REG, which houses Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert’s properties, and the Philadelphia franchise is led by Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, which owns the 76ers.
While Denver’s fans will have to wait a lot longer to get a WNBA team in town, the city should be nearing the top of the WNBA’s list on who to add next if the league keeps up the exponential growth its seen in the 2020s.
