Maura Healey is not giving up on getting a WNBA team

Although current developments within the WNBA panorama have been a setback to Boston’s want to have knowledgeable girls’s basketball crew, Gov. Maura Healey stated she’s not giving up.

Healey, a former co-captain of Harvard girls’s basketball, was requested concerning the WNBA subplot during an interview on GBH’s “Boston Public Radio” on Tuesday.

Having acknowledged earlier within the interview that “I don’t know that I’d be the place I’m at present have been it not for alternatives that I had in sports activities,” Healey spoke up with regards to basketball.

Particularly, she was requested if she’s talked to WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert after the decision in April by the league to approve the bid of the Fertitta household to purchase the Connecticut Solar and transfer the crew to Houston following the 2026 season.

It goes towards a bid led by former Celtics co-owner Steve Pagliuca to purchase the Solar and transfer them to Boston. The league successfully blocked Pagliuca’s then-record bid for a WNBA crew, citing the logic that “relocation selections are made by the WNBA Board of Governors and never by particular person groups,” and that Boston was much less of a precedence than cities that had already utilized for enlargement groups.

Healey famous that she had spoken to Engelbert.

“Yeah, and look I used to be actually disenchanted with the choice they made to maneuver the crew to Houston, and an NBA proprietor,” Healey defined. “However I’m not giving up.

“Boston needs to be a house to a WNBA crew,” she added. “We invented basketball right here. Really the lads’s and ladies’s sport was invented in Boston.”

(As a caller later identified — and Healey was fast to amend her earlier assertion — the sport of basketball was technically invented in Springfield.)

Past the Boston implications, Healey additionally defined that with the Solar set to pack up and transfer to Houston, the complete area will likely be with no WNBA crew.

“New England will likely be with no [professional] girls’s basketball crew,” she stated. “That’s loopy. That’s simply loopy. So we’ve acquired to repair that. I’ll proceed to work with the league, Celtics possession. Girls’s basketball, to say it’s on the rise is an understatement. I imply folks find it irresistible, and we must always have a WNBA crew right here. I’ll do no matter I can to make that occur.”