September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
Portland Fire’s 2025 Season: A Franchise Reignited
Portland Fire’s 2025 season never featured a single possession. It still felt like a comeback. The WNBA’s newest franchise spent the year building itself from nothing but a name, an arena, and a promise. Portland answered with a response no expansion market has matched. Before a single ball went up, more than 15,000 households had already put down deposits on season tickets. That is not a city waiting to be convinced. That is a city that had already decided.
Ownership made the boldest statement of the year before 2025 even began. RAJ Sports already owned the NWSL’s Portland Thorns. Siblings Lisa Bhathal Merage and Alex Bhathal lead that ownership group. They paid a $125 million expansion fee after the league awarded Portland its franchise in September 2024. The bigger reveal came on July 15, 2025, when the team unveiled its identity to the public. Ownership did not invent something new. It resurrected something old. Portland’s original WNBA franchise carried the Fire name from 2000 through 2002 before folding. The new owners chose to reclaim that name rather than bury it. Karina LeBlanc, RAJ Sports’ executive vice president of strategic growth, said the search weighed plenty of alternatives. One option refused to let go. The name, she explained, captured “that fire that you have to represent your city, that passion that you have for what it’s about.” Choosing it meant accepting real discomfort, given Oregon’s history with destructive wildfires. LeBlanc acknowledged the decision was made deliberately, not carelessly. The Fire join the league as its fifteenth franchise, and their arrival will end a twenty-four-year absence of WNBA basketball in Portland.
A franchise with no players still needs people to run it. Portland spent the back half of 2025 racing to fill every chair before the roster work could even begin.
The Fire did not gamble on an unproven hire. Vanja Černivec arrived from the Golden State Valkyries, where she served as vice president of basketball operations. That debut season produced more than 20,000 season ticket deposits and a playoff berth. Her résumé also included stints with the London Lions and a run as an international scout for the Chicago Bulls. She also played professionally in her native Slovenia. Portland announced her hire on August 25, 2025. She formally joined the organization three weeks later, on September 15. Černivec made clear she had no interest in copying what she had just left behind. She said Portland needed to “carve out our own path”. Borrowing a template built somewhere else was never the plan. That distinction mattered for a fan base eager to be more than a Bay Area sequel.
The climb to Černivec’s hire had not been smooth. Interim president Clare Hamill took over day-to-day operations in late June. She stepped in after president Inky Son’s abrupt departure left a leadership vacuum before the team even had a name. Ashley Battle joined in October as vice president of basketball operations, strategy and innovation. The hire gave Černivec a second experienced voice inside the building. That turnover at the top could have destabilized the launch. Instead, the front office steadied itself in time to make its most important hires before the year closed out.
Every expansion team’s first head coach inherits an impossible job. He must build a culture around a roster that does not exist yet.
Portland’s search ended with a name outside the typical WNBA pipeline. Alex Sarama built his reputation through skill-acquisition research rather than a playing career. The British coach was introduced as the Fire’s inaugural head coach on October 28, 2025. His path ran through Guildford, England, through NBA Europe in Madrid, and through a head coaching stint in Italy. Most recently, it ran through the Cleveland Cavaliers organization. There he served as an assistant under Kenny Atkinson during a 64-18 season that produced the East’s top seed. Sarama already had ties to Portland before the Fire ever called. He spent the 2023-24 season developing players for Rip City Remix, the Trail Blazers’ G League club in Portland. His arrival came paired with fresh news: season ticket deposits had climbed past 15,000. The franchise wore that number as validation of the hire itself.
Sarama did not build his staff alone. Brittni Donaldson joined in November as assistant coach and assistant general manager. The dual title reflected how lean the operation still needed to run. Sylvia Fowles signed on as an assistant coach in December. The Hall of Fame-caliber center’s career defined a generation of post play. Her hire closed out the year and gave the staff instant credibility in locker rooms it had not yet built.
A fan base rarely commits to a team before it has a player, a game, or a loss. Portland did exactly that. The 15,000-plus season ticket deposits gathered by the fall outpaced what most cities manage after an actual debut season. Portland cleared that bar before its debut even arrived. The excitement drew an obvious comparison to the Thorns. The same ownership group had already turned that NWSL franchise into one of the league’s model fan bases. Portland leaned into that parallel rather than shy away from it. The deposit tally alone made Portland Fire’s 2025 season one of the most-watched launches in league history. The Fire will play home games at Moda Center, sharing the building with the NBA’s Trail Blazers. Rebuilding was never the plan ownership sold. Instant relevance was.
Nothing about Portland Fire’s 2025 season resembled a normal year in professional sports, and that was the point. The roster remained unbuilt by December. The league’s expansion draft still sat months away, and free agency stayed untouched. What Portland had instead was scaffolding. It had a general manager who already helped one expansion team reach the playoffs. It had a head coach pulled from inside the same building where the Trail Blazers had trusted him with prospects. It had a coaching staff anchored by a Hall of Fame presence in Fowles. Every hire in 2025 pointed toward the same target: a first tip-off in May 2026. The front office intended to win from opening night, not treat the debut as a formality.
That urgency separated Portland’s approach from a typical expansion timeline. Franchises often use their first year to lower expectations before the games even begin. Portland spent 2025 raising them instead, stacking credentialed hires and record deposit numbers on top of each other. Patience started to feel like the only thing standing between the city and its team. The Fire name carried history into 2025, but the substance built beneath it belonged entirely to the new era. By the time the calendar turned toward 2026, Portland Fire’s 2025 season had already answered the only question that mattered heading into an inaugural year. Would the city show up? It had, in numbers no expansion franchise had ever seen before a single game tipped off. For a city that last watched WNBA basketball in 2002, the wait itself had become part of the story, and 2025 finally gave that patience a shape worth believing in.
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