WNBA announces Bay Area expansion team to begin play in 2025 - ESPN

The Golden State Warriors have been one of the most successful NBA franchises over the past decade. They want to do the same in the WNBA, which announced Thursday morning that it had approved the organization as an expansion franchise starting in the 2025 season.

«We're coming in here, number one, to win,» Warriors chairman Joe Lacob told ESPN. «Number two, we want to see this league and women's basketball grow, and we hope to be a big part of it.

»We think it's a watershed event for us to come in and commit to it in a big way. We're going to bring all of our resources. We can put this machine to work, and we're going to do that."

The Warriors ranked first in Forbes' most recent NBA valuations at $7 billion, largely due to the enormous success of the Chase Center in San Francisco, a state-of-the-art privately financed arena that opened in 2019, and corporate sponsorships.

Lacob said he intends to put the full force of the Warriors' business structure behind the new WNBA franchise.

«I believe we'll have the No. 1 revenue of any WNBA team,» he said. «And I think we can do very, very well as a business because we know how to do this. We have all the facilities, and we can bring sponsor dollars to the team and ultimately to the league that will help the league in a big way.»

The team will play its games at the Chase Center and train in Oakland, where the Warriors practiced until 2019.

As such, Lacob said, the new franchise is likely to be known as «Golden State» to reflect a fan base across the entire Bay Area. However, internal discussions will continue over the next few months on whether it will be called the Warriors or by another name, as well as around uniforms and logos.

This is something of a full-circle moment for