Portland Fire home opener sparks WNBA return to the Rose City after 24 year absence

Oregon’s WNBA team, the Portland Fire, will play its first official game of the 2026 season Saturday against the Chicago Sky.

The 6 p.m. tip-off will also mark the official return of professional women’s basketball to the city after a hiatus of nearly a quarter century.

It’s been a historic, and at times tumultuous, ramp up. The Portland Fire are returning to the league after a transformational labor agreement and during a period of unprecedented growth, both of which add excitement and challenges for the expansion team. The team’s players and leaders seem to be approaching it all with a sense of unbridled optimism.

“Even in situations we’re down,” Alex Sarama, Portland Fire head coach, said. “We’re never out.”

Sarama is a first-time WNBA head coach. In his team’s one and only preseason game in Portland, the Fire lost to the Los Angeles Sparks 85-75. Postgame, Sarama praised his team’s resilience, and thanked the 13,550 fans for the standing ovation despite the loss.

“I’ve never had a game where we lost and the crowd was still there standing, yelling, supporting us,” he said. “We all felt that. It was just incredible.”

Sarama, a 30-year-old from Guildford, England, is coaching a young crew of players with just a few veterans in the mix. He’s building team culture around a style of basketball training that emphasizes using constraints to the team’s advantage instead of viewing them as stumbling blocks — whether that’s on or off the court.

Sarama said it starts by asking, “How can we respond to all the situations that will come our way this year?”

He wants the Fire to be a team that opponents loathe facing “because of the relentless effort defensively and the pressing, the energy, the disruptions,” Sarama told reporters at practice this week. “That is going to be a common theme we’re going to keep coming back to throughout the season.”

The team has the advantage of playing in a city known to support women athletes. Team owners, siblings Lisa Bhathal Merage and Alex Bhathal, have already experienced that support, as the owners of the Portland Thorns. The NWSL team is known for consistently being among the league leaders in attendance.

The original iteration of the Portland Fire played in the city from 2000 to 2002, when the WNBA was still relatively new. The nascent league lacked robust media and advertising time, but the Fire still managed to draw around 8,000 fans per game at the time.

The WNBA is now in its 30th season and is experiencing skyrocketing popularity. Recent seasons have broken attendance and viewership records, and the league plans to grow to 19 teams by 2030.

While the return of the Portland Fire has generated excitement since the team was originally announced almost two years ago, the actual players have had a record short time to gel as a team. Normally, an expansion team starts building its roster five to six months ahead of the season. The Fire had closer to six weeks due to the labor negotiations that didn’t wrap up until March.

Players have had just a few weeks of practice time together, and just two preseason games — one away and one at home. To add to the challenge, seven players sat out with illness or injuries for the home preseason game.

Fire guard Sarah Ashlee Barker is about to start her second year in the WNBA. Barker told reporters the team has created a strong sense of chemistry and love for each other in a short period of time.

“It’s actually been pretty unique with how close we’ve gotten early on,” Barker said. “One of the things that we all kind of came into an agreement of is, ‘hey, let’s hang out with each other off the court. Let’s get to know each other off the court,’ because that translates on the court.”

Haley Jones, a forward-guard about to enter her fourth year, said her Fire teammates and the coaching staff have created a collaborative and positive environment.

That’s a big deal, Jones said, because players are also competing for long-term roster spots.

“It’s such a hard league to make,” Jones, who was waived from a team last year but is on the Fire’s opening day roster, said. “It’s the best league in the world and there’s X amount of spots.”

The expansion teams in Portland and Toronto help, Jones said, but it’s still just a small bump in available WNBA roster spots.

“Even with the expansion, it’s still less than 200 players,” Jones said. “So it’s a very elite group.”

She said the encouraging atmosphere at practice takes some of the pressure off.

Jones has played in front of Oregon crowds as a visitor in the past. She played college ball at Stanford and made yearly visits to Eugene and Corvallis. She said she’s glad to have the crowds cheering for her this time.

“I’m really excited to be on the same side – and the amount of fans that have come up to me like, ‘Oh, I used to boo you, and now I get to cheer for you.’ I’m like, ‘thank you, way to switch it up.’”

Jones wasn’t in Portland long before those cheers were directed at her: she scored the Fire’s first basket at the only home preseason game.

“It was really just a cool thing to have that many people there,” Jones said of the more than 13,000 fans that showed up for a game that doesn’t count towards the team record. “Even though we were down, they were involved the whole game – and we definitely fed off that energy for all four quarters.”

The Portland Fire’s first official game is Saturday, May 9th at 6 p.m. at the Moda Center.