The Original Portland Fire

Before the 2026 expansion team, there was another Portland Fire. They played three seasons at the Rose Garden (now the Moda Center) in Portland's Rose Quarter. They never made the playoffs. But they drew more fans than half the league. And by their final year, they were actually getting good.

That's the part people forget. Portland didn't fail the Fire. The WNBA failed Portland.

The Short, Weird Life of the Original Fire

The Fire tipped off in June 2000 as part of the WNBA's expansion from 12 to 16 teams. Like every WNBA franchise at the time, the team was owned and subsidized by the NBA, in this case Paul Allen's Vulcan Sports & Entertainment, which also ran the Trail Blazers. The idea was simple: put women's basketball in NBA arenas during the summer, let the NBA parent clubs foot the bill, and grow the sport.

Linda Hargrove coached and served as general manager for all three seasons. The 2000 debut was rough: 10-22. Expansion teams lose a lot. But fans showed up anyway. The Rose Garden atmosphere was real. Average attendance was over 8,000, which put Portland solidly in the upper half of the league.

2001 was slightly better on the court: 11-21. Still no playoffs, still no winning record, but steady improvement. The Fire drafted Jackie Stiles 4th overall that year. Stiles had been a scoring machine at Missouri State and won the 2001 WNBA Rookie of the Year award. Jenny Mowe, a 6-5 center drafted 20th overall from the University of Oregon, gave the team a local connection. Sylvia Crawley and DeMya Walker added veteran presence. The roster had real talent.

And then 2002 happened. Not a collapse. The opposite. The Fire went 16-16. Five hundred. After two losing seasons, Portland put together a genuinely competitive team. They finished 5th in the Western Conference. The pieces were coming together. Fans were averaging 8,000 per game. Stiles was establishing herself. The trajectory was up.

It didn't matter. The thing that killed the team wasn't the record. It was a boardroom decision made 2,800 miles away.

Why the Fire Folded

The WNBA was hemorrhaging money. The league's NBA-subsidized ownership model (where parent clubs absorbed losses) was unsustainable. In 2002, the league announced a shift: each WNBA team would need individual ownership. NBA owners could buy their WNBA teams outright, or sell them to someone who would.

Paul Allen said no thanks.

Fair enough. Allen was already dealing with Trail Blazers drama and reportedly losing money on the franchise. But here's what stings: a group led by Clyde Drexler and Terry Emmert tried to buy the team and couldn't finalize a deal. Portland and Miami both folded after the 2002 season. The Cleveland Rockers followed a year later. The league went from 16 teams to 13 in two years. Just like that, the Fire were gone.

Portland's attendance, over 8,000 per game, was higher than several teams that survived contraction. The market was never the problem. The ownership structure was. The Fire were getting better on the court (10-22, 11-21, 16-16, each year an improvement) and the fans were showing up. Portland was a .500 team with a Rookie of the Year and 8,000 fans a night. That should have been enough. It wasn't.

The Record Book

Twenty-Four Years of Nothing

From 2002 to 2026, Portland had no WNBA team. Twenty-four years. An entire generation of basketball fans grew up, went to college, started careers, and had kids of their own without ever seeing professional women's basketball in their city.

But something happened during those 24 years that changed everything: the Thorns.

The Portland Thorns launched in 2013 and immediately became the best-attended women's professional sports team in the world. Not in the NWSL. Not in the US. In the world. They averaged over 16,000 fans. They won three championships. They proved, with receipts not vibes, that Portland will show up for women's sports at a scale most cities can't touch.

The Thorns didn't just keep the seat warm. They built the entire infrastructure (the supporter culture, the corporate sponsorships, the media attention, the community ecosystem) that makes the Fire's return viable in a way it never was in 2000.

The $125M expansion fee alone tells you how much the landscape has changed. In 2000, NBA owners were assigned WNBA teams almost as a civic obligation. In 2026, ownership groups are competing for the right to pay nine figures for a franchise. RAJ Sports didn't stumble into Portland. They targeted it because the market data is overwhelming.

The media deal is the biggest structural difference. The original Fire existed in a league that was essentially a charitable project of the NBA. The 2026 Fire will play in a league with an $2.2 billion, 11-year media contract across Disney, Amazon, and NBC. That's not "we hope this works" money. That's "this is a real business" money.

And then there's the thing no spreadsheet fully captures: Portland is different now. The city has spent a decade proving it will support women's sports at an elite level. The Thorns built the culture. The Cascade expanded it. The supporter groups, the watch parties, the businesses built around match days, that ecosystem didn't exist in 2000. It's the Fire's biggest competitive advantage, and it's the reason Portland calls itself Title Town.

The original Fire deserved better than they got. The 2026 Fire are arriving in a city that's spent 24 years, without meaning to, building exactly the conditions a WNBA team needs to thrive.