All of it started with a Thanksgiving dialog between Michael Carter-Williams and his mother, longtime basketball coach Mandy Carter-Zegarowski.
What if we introduced a WNBA crew to Boston?
Now, only a few months later, the 33-year-old former NBA participant is main the cost to make that dream a actuality.
All the things got here collectively rapidly. Carter-Williams acquired related with Donnie Wahlberg, a Boston-based actor and producer, and the 2 collectively launched the Boston Girls’s Basketball Companions, a gaggle that goals to submit an enlargement bid to convey a WNBA franchise to Boston within the coming years.
For Carter-Williams, who was the NBA Rookie of the Yr in 2014 and performed within the league for almost a decade, investing in girls’s basketball has lengthy been a no brainer.
“I used to be at all times form of tapped in with girls’s basketball, so I used to be at all times a supporter earlier than it was cool, ?” Carter-Williams advised SB Nation in an unique dialog on Wednesday.
It’s how he was raised. His mom Mandy based a complete AAU program greater than 20 years in the past. That enterprise in the end became MCW Starz, an AAU membership primarily based in South Hamilton, Massachusetts that features 14 ladies’ basketball groups.
“We’ve been concerned in girls’s basketball for about 12, 13 years now,” Carter-Williams stated. “We at all times had plans and goals and talked about how cool would it not be to have a WNBA crew in Boston. After which we began speaking to the best folks and fashioned a gaggle, and one factor led to a different, and also you’re in a practical place to no less than put collectively a gaggle that would make a run at getting a crew of Boston.”
The WNBA is within the midst of a fast and unprecedented enlargement
The league included 12 groups final 12 months and is including a thirteenth, the Golden State Valkyries, forward of the 2025 season. There are already two groups slated to hitch in 2026, in Toronto Tempo and Portland, and Sports activities Enterprise Journal reported that Cleveland is predicted to turn out to be the league’s sixteenth crew in 2028.
WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert stated final 12 months she’d wish to get to 16 groups by 2028. However, the demand has far outpaced that preliminary projection. An extended checklist of cities have expressed curiosity in bringing a WNBA crew to city, a listing that features Charlotte, Austin, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Houston, Milwaukee, Nashville, and Detroit.
Due to Carter-Williams and Wahlberg, Boston is now the most recent to enter the fold.
Might Carter-Williams and Wahlberg purchase an current WNBA crew?
Whereas enlargement has been on the forefront of dialog, it’s not the one means a WNBA crew may find yourself in Boston.
The Boston Girls’s Basketball Companions can be open to buying an current franchise, if one have been up on the market, Carter-Williams confirmed to SB Nation. Probably the most intuitive choose for that sale can be the Connecticut Solar, who’re presently New England’s WNBA crew however are primarily based in Uncasville, Connecticut.
Final 12 months, Solar gamers brazenly expressed a need to play in Boston. After taking part in one sold-out recreation at TD Backyard towards the Los Angeles Sparks in August, DiJonai Carrington was blunt in expressing her need to play in entrance of a much bigger crowd.
“It felt nice,” she stated of the ambiance at TD Backyard. “It felt like what each evening ought to really feel like.”
DiJonai Carrington requested what the ambiance was like at TD Backyard:
“It felt nice. It felt like what each evening ought to really feel like.” pic.twitter.com/U481e4NU2W
— Noa Dalzell (@NoaDalzell) August 21, 2024
Since then, Connecticut has skilled monumental turnover: head coach Stephanie White left for the Indiana Fever, Alyssa Thomas, DeWanna Bonner, and Brionna Jones departed as free brokers, and Carrington and Ty Harris have been traded to Dallas. The one top-six participant from final 12 months’s playoff crew presently on subsequent 12 months’s roster is Marina Mabrey, who has requested a commerce (a request that Solar president Jen Rizzotti has denied).
Thomas, the Solar’s longtime franchise participant who’s presently taking part in in Unequalled, knowledgeable offseason 3-on-3 girls’s basketball league in Miami, has criticized the Solar’s lack of funding of their infrastructure. Connecticut is one in all solely two WNBA groups that haven’t introduced plans to assemble their personal follow facility.
“They’ve every little thing you presumably want right here,” Thomas stated final month of Unequalled’s follow facility, a number of days earlier than her choice to go to the Phoenix Mercury was introduced. “They don’t actually have a number of these issues in Connecticut. I’ve been attempting to soak up as a lot data as I can.”
Nonetheless, the Mohegan Solar tribe that owns the Connecticut Solar just isn’t in promoting the crew (nor seeing a WNBA crew come to Boston).
Carter-Williams stated that if the Solar have been up on the market sooner or later, they’d be concerned about buying the franchise.
“I feel we’re open to all potentialities,” he stated. “That might be nice if that would occur. The principle aim is to only get a crew to Boston. And I feel there’s many various avenues [through which] that would occur. That’s the aim — it doesn’t matter what street we have to journey to get there, that’s what we need to do.”
Carter-Williams, who’s from 40 minutes north of Boston, believes Boston is the right location for a WNBA crew.
“Boston is such an amazing sports activities city — it’s a championship metropolis,” he stated. “I simply assume that the quantity of help that these girls will obtain from the folks in Boston can be nice.”
He additionally maintains that the existence of a Boston crew would profit the league as a complete, from the standpoint that it could assist generate new rivalries.
“Rivalries are an enormous factor in sports activities,” Carter-Williams stated. “And, there’s no rivalry larger than the Purple Sox and the Yankees, proper? Boston is at all times concerned, the Lakers and Celtics, Boston is at all times concerned in these huge rivalries in sports activities, and that’s what makes them nice. I feel the WNBA is lacking that.”
Carter-Williams wasn’t in a position to share specifics relating to which particular venues the possession group is exploring, however did share that he’s seen monumental help from policymakers within the state. The Boston Globe’s Gary Washburn reported that Mayor Michele Wu and Governor Maura Healey have each provided their help for the bid.
“We’ve been in contact with a number of folks,” Carter-Williams stated. “We’ve been in contact with the town. We’ve been in contact with folks relating to venues, they usually’re actually enthusiastic about it.”
He additionally believes that the WNBA will in the end elevate the variety of whole groups past the present projections of 16 franchises.
“I feel persons are selecting up on attempting to get enlargement groups, form of placing strain on the WNBA, and I feel they’re beginning to have some good issues,” Carter-Williams stated. “So, I feel they’ll make some changes, and I feel we’ll see enlargement groups coming at a sooner tempo than we’ve been seeing them.”
