CT Sun Sold to Houston for $300M: What It Means

The Connecticut Sun is heading to Houston, and with it goes the state’s last major league sports franchise.

Texas-based PaperCity Magazine and ESPN first reported the sale Friday. The Mohegan Tribe confirmed the deal Monday, ending months of speculation about the WNBA team’s future. Under the agreement, businessman Tilman Fertitta, who owns the NBA’s Houston Rockets and currently serves as U.S. ambassador to Italy, will take control of the franchise for a reported $300 million. The price tag makes it the largest sale in WNBA history.

The Sun will play one final season in Connecticut this year, with games scheduled in Hartford and Boston before the franchise moves south in 2027. The relocated team is expected to revive the Houston Comets name, returning a brand that was active in that city from 1997 to 2008 before the original franchise was disbanded.

For Connecticut fans who have followed the Sun through 23 seasons, the confirmation stings. The team has been the anchor of women’s basketball in a state that takes serious pride in the sport, built in large part on the legacy of the UConn women’s program.

“Mohegan owes an enormous amount of gratitude first and foremost to our extraordinary fans cheering on the team for 23 incredible seasons,” Joe Soper, corresponding secretary for the Mohegan Tribe, said in a statement. “This team and what the talented women who have worn this uniform over the years have meant to Mohegan Sun, our region and the impact they’ve made both on and off the court, has been nothing short of remarkable.”

The sale raises uncomfortable questions about who actually controls a sports franchise when an owner wants to sell. The WNBA, largely owned by the NBA and influenced by NBA-affiliated team owners, took the position that the league itself held the authority over any sale, not the Mohegan Tribe. That stance effectively sidelined two competing bids that would have kept the team in the region.

Boston Celtics minority owner Steve Pagliuca offered $325 million last August, higher than the Fertitta deal. An investment group led by Marc Lasry, the former Milwaukee Bucks co-owner, made a separate counteroffer aimed at relocating the team to Hartford rather than losing it entirely. Connecticut state officials backed the Lasry proposal. Governor Ned Lamont launched a public push last fall to keep the Sun in state, going so far as to propose using state pension funds to help Connecticut acquire a minority stake in the team.

“I’m trying to keep the Sun in Connecticut,” Lamont said at the time. “I think they belong in Connecticut, which is a birthplace of women’s basketball.”

The league’s preference for the Houston sale was clear throughout the process. The WNBA has been pushing to align team ownership more closely with NBA franchises, and Fertitta’s dual ownership of the Rockets fits that strategy neatly. Both competing bids, including the one that exceeded the accepted price, were passed over.

That dynamic is what fans and observers in Connecticut are grappling with now. The Mohegan Tribe built a competitive franchise over more than two decades. Their players became community figures. The Sun reached the WNBA Finals multiple times and consistently competed at the top of the league. None of that kept the franchise from being steered away by a league structure that prioritized its own expansion goals over the team’s existing home.

The pension fund proposal Lamont floated drew criticism from fiscal conservatives who questioned the wisdom of putting public retirement money into a sports franchise. The debate never fully resolved, partly because the bids from Pagliuca and Lasry never got serious traction with the league anyway.

What Connecticut is left with is one final season to say goodbye. The Sun will take the court again this spring, and for one last summer, fans in Hartford and across the state will watch a franchise that gave this region more than two decades of competitive women’s basketball. Then the lights go out, the Comets rise again in Houston, and Connecticut will search for whatever comes next.