Why doesn’t Boston have a WNBA team?

“I know we’d have tons of fans and huge interest here,” Gov. Maura Healey said.

With loads of titles and diehard fans, Boston is undoubtedly a sports town.

Most recently, the city turned into a sea of green for a celebratory parade after the Celtics won their 18th banner in June.

But despite this zeal for sports, there has never been a WNBA team in the Boston area.

Why is that? And will it ever change?

The WNBA comes to TD Garden

This summer, a WNBA game was held at TD Garden in Boston for the first time, as the Connecticut Sun and Los Angeles Sparks faced off before a sold-out crowd.

“Hopefully this isn’t the last,” Sun star DiJonai Carrington said following the game. “Hopefully this is the first of many.”

Ceyda Mumcu, the sports management chair at the University of New Haven, told Boston.com she thinks the league is “experimenting” through these one-off games in different locations to see how the markets react.

“Seeing a sold-out game in a larger arena and engagement from the local fan base is an incredible signal,” she said of the TD Garden game. “I think it is certainly showing that Boston could be a viable market for an [expansion] team.”

The 12-team WNBA, founded in 1996, is “far ahead” of the NBA, founded nearly 50 years before, at the same point in its product lifecycle, Mumcu said.

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