WNBA to add Bay Area expansion team

The WNBA will expand in 2025, the league announced this morning, adding a new team that will play at San Francisco’s Chase Center, home of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors. The franchise will operate under the same ownership as the Warriors and practice at the Oakland facility where the Warriors practiced until 2019. “We’re coming in here, number one, to win,” Warriors chairman Joe Lacob told ESPN. “Number two, we want to see this league and women’s basketball grow, and we hope to be a big part of it.

The WNBA currently has 12 teams — six each in its Eastern and Western conferences. The league’s last expansion came in 2000, growing to 16 teams. Several franchises went under in the years that followed, and the league has been cautious about expanding ever since, as ESPN notes. Its newest team, the Atlanta Dream, joined in 2008.

The new Bay Area team’s name is still under discussion, but Lacob hinted that they’ll likely go with the short and sweet “Golden State.”