WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert hears one question over and over, the same one her predecessors have been asked for more than decade: When will the 12-team WNBA expand?
With the WNBA playing its first preseason game in Toronto on Saturday — the Minnesota Lynx meet the Chicago Sky at Scotiabank Arena — the question comes up again even more specifically. Will Canada’s most populous city, home of the NBA’s Toronto Raptors, get a WNBA expansion team?
Toronto has long been on the list of cities thought to be in the mix. A week ago in an online forum with Sports Business Journal, Engelbert said she would like to see two more teams come into the league in the foreseeable future. The Bay Area; Toronto; Denver; Austin, Texas; Nashville, Tennessee; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Portland, Oregon, were some of the potential sites she mentioned.
The latter two cities previously had WNBA teams that were affiliated with the NBA, but both disbanded. The Charlotte Sting were an original WNBA franchise in 1997 that folded after the 2006 season. The Portland Fire barely had…
