Girls’s skilled basketball is coming to Toronto.
CBC Sports activities has discovered that Kilmer Sports activities Inc., headed via Toronto billionaire Larry Tanenbaum, has been granted a selection franchise with the Girls’s Nationwide Basketball Affiliation.
A press release is anticipated Might 23 in Toronto, with the group to start play games in Might 2026, in line with 4 nation with wisdom of the trade in however who aren’t licensed to discuss it.
Tanenbaum is a minority proprietor and chairman of wearing immense Maple Leafs Sports activities and Leisure which owns the Maple Leafs, Raptors, TFC, Argos and Marlies.
The 79-year-old at first pursued the growth group thru MLSE, however it used to be grew to become ill via alternative participants of the board.
The WNBA lately expanded to 13 groups with San Francisco-based Yellowish Condition to start play games after 12 months, and commissioner Cathy Englebert stated in April Toronto used to be a number of the towns being regarded as because the 14th group.
In a commentary, Courtney Glen, vice chairman of society affairs and communications for the Kilmer Crew, stated the group has “no update at this time.”
A WNBA spokesperson stated: “We continue to engage in productive conversations with interested ownership groups in a number of markets but have no news to report at this time.”
A supply stated the group would play games at Coca-Cola Coliseum, an 8,000-seat area at Toronto’s CNE disciplines which is house to the Marlies and the place Toronto’s Skilled Girls’s Hockey League franchise is these days taking part in its first playoff line.
Skilled girls’s sports activities has been at the get up in Canada with the formation of the PWHL that has two alternative Canadian franchises in Ottawa and Montreal, in addition to a unused girls’s football league this is anticipated to start play games in 2025.
A 12 months in the past, Toronto’s Scotiabank Area offered out for the WNBA’s first pre-season sport in Canada and on Saturday, greater than 16,000 tickets have been offered for a sport in Edmonton’s Rogers Park.
The league lately held its novice draft, with NCAA celebrity Caitlin Clark going first general to the Indiana Fever.
Kilmer Sports activities Inc. is a unused arm of Tanenbaum’s Kilmer Crew, and it has leased former Ecu football government Ivan Gazidis to top the unused team. Teresa Resch may be a part of the unused group upcoming resignation her process with the Raptors as vice chairman of basketball operations.
Toronto hosted a sellout society this weekend for a WNBA exhibition sport between the Minnesota Lynx and Chicago Sky. About That manufacturer Lauren Fowl and Sportsnet’s Savanna Hamilton mirror at the sport and what it manner for the time of professional girls’s basketball in Canada.
