Lamont: WNBA wanted Sun in bigger market

Gov. Ned Lamont said his administration did everything it could to try to keep the Connecticut Sun in the state.  

Lamont (D-Connecticut) said ultimately the WNBA wanted to move the team to a bigger market, preferably to an ownership group with NBA ties.  

 “WNBA and the NBA are very closely aligned,” he said after a press conference in Shelton. “Like I said, Houston is a much bigger TV market. I think that was 90 percent of the dynamic.” 

The Mohegan Tribe officially announced Monday that it was selling the team for $300 million to Tilman Fertitta, owner of the NBA’s Houston Rockets.  

That’s significantly more than the $10 million the tribe paid to purchase the team in 2003, when it was based in Orlando.  

It’s also less than the reported offers of $ 325 million each that the tribe received from groups in Boston and Connecticut.  

The WNBA rebuffed both offers. Lawmakers said the WNBA’s rise in popularity likely made it too big for Connecticut.  

“Connecticut’s a small market,” Rep. Dave Rutigliano, (R-Trumbull), said. “It’s not a large television market, so I could see why they’d want to find greener pastures.” 

Lamont said he did everything he could to keep the team in Connecticut.  

At one point, he backed a plan to have Connecticut use a portion of its pension fund to buy a stake in the team. In exchange, the Sun would have played some home games in Hartford.  

Lamont said criticism from some lawmakers likely made it harder to sell the idea to the WNBA.  

“Sometimes folks in the legislature stepped in –’ I don’t like the way the deal was structured’ – cast a bit of a shadow over what we were trying to do,” he said.  

Rutigliano continued to call the plan a bad idea, noting employee unions also opposed it.  

“It’s not just the legislators that said no about using 100 million dollars to the pension fund,” Rutigliano said. “Did he ask the teachers? Did he ask the pensioners if that was something they wanted to invest their money in?” 

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