‘If it was up to me, we might relocate’

Forward of the Connecticut Solar’s sold-out recreation at TD Backyard in opposition to Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever, Solar rookie guard Saniya Rivers spoke extremely of her workforce’s non permanent residence venue.

“If it was as much as me, we would relocate right here,” Rivers said of Boston on Tuesday while speaking with MassLive’s Kenneth Manoj, earlier than including:  “[Boston is] an amazing metropolis, has nice meals, nice retailers — I really like to buy. So simply having the ability to come to the neighboring metropolis and simply play right here, I believe it [does] so much for ladies’s basketball basically, you realize, get some noise round right here [and] get folks supporting girls’s basketball.  

“Hopefully, perhaps they will advocate for us to, you realize, perhaps even relocate. I really like Connecticut, it’s effective, however I believe the advertising and marketing right here itself is simply going to be higher for a girls’s basketball program and I believe we will make a number of noise right here beginning tonight, so I’m simply excited to be part of it.”

Tuesday marks the second straight season the place the Solar have held a recreation at TD Backyard. The WNBA franchise recorded a sell-out crowd in Boston in August 2024 in a recreation in opposition to the Los Angeles Sparks earlier than replicating the feat on Tuesday in opposition to Clark and Co. 

The Sun had 19,156 tickets sold for Tuesday’s recreation — the third promote out of the 2025 season, the third highest attendance to a WNBA recreation this season thus far, and the second largest variety of tickets offered to a Solar recreation within the franchise’s historical past.

Given the spectacular attendance numbers in Boston, it ought to come as little shock that this market has been linked to the Solar as team ownership reportedly weighs selling the team.

However earlier this month, Boston Ladies’s Basketball Companions spokesman AJ Gerritson instructed The Boston Globe‘s Gary Washburn that the Mohegan Tribe — which owns the Solar — is selecting to hunt new buyers for the workforce to maintain them in Connecticut for the foreseeable future. 

“When it comes to the trail ahead for us, it appears increasingly prefer it’s going to be enlargement,” Gerritson instructed Washburn concerning Boston Ladies’s Basketball Companions’ probabilities of touchdown a WNBA workforce. “And by way of the enlargement course of, we weren’t in a position to submit a proper bid final time it was open purely due to timing. Since then, we now have labored tirelessly to satisfy and exceed all requirements for enlargement.”

Even when the Mohegan Tribe are steadfast of their want to maintain the workforce in Connecticut, Rivers’ feedback are simply the most recent in a protracted line of endorsements broadcast by Solar gamers about Boston’s viability as a WNBA market.

“Positively hope this isn’t the final time that there’s a girls’s recreation right here, particularly for our workforce,” then-Solar guard DiJonai Carrington instructed reporters after final 12 months’s recreation at TD Backyard. “I simply assume the gang was unbelievable. 

“There have been lulls for us offensively after we weren’t scoring, however the crowd was by no means out of it. They had been chanting the entire whole recreation. I believe they gave us power, I believe they gave us that little enhance on the finish of the sport to complete robust.”

 

Conor Ryan is a employees author masking the Bruins, Celtics, Patriots, and Pink Sox for Boston.com, a job he has held since 2023.