It started, as Connecticut Sun president Jennifer Rizzotti remembers it, as a passing thought last fall — a what-if that eventually grew legs.
Paul Rector, the Sun’s vice president of growth, had a friend in the Celtics’ office and he floated the question to see if there might be any interest in TD Garden hosting one of the Sun’s home games this season.
The Sun have had the same core staff since Rizzotti was named president in 2021, and she said the franchise’s relationship with the Celtics has grown each year. Players and staff traveled to Boston. The Sun have tapped into some of the Celtics staff to mentor their own younger staff.
“He just kind of brought it up,” Rizzotti said. “ ‘Would you guys be interested in potentially hosting us next summer?’ We’ve been in the Garden, we have this relationship, they’ve been super collaborative. I think it was just that our network within the Celtics organization has grown, so we were just comfortable putting it out there.”
The friend at the Celtics had a contact at the Garden and told him to reach out. They jumped on a call and the Garden reps were all ears. The Garden was already planning a milestone moment in January, hosting the women’s Beanpot Championship for the first time.
“They said, ‘Yeah, send us some dates,’ ” Rizzotti said. “They felt like it was a good time for them to expand into the WNBA as well.”
That’s when the ball officially got rolling. Rizzotti reached out to the league to make sure the team had its blessing to play a game outside of its market, she and got the go-ahead.
“From there, we started getting to work,” she said.
When the Sun play the Los Angeles Sparks Tuesday, it will be the first time the Garden has hosted a WNBA game. The game was announced as a sellout Friday, and as much as that says about the magnetism of women’s sports right now, Rizzotti and the Sun see the game as an opportunity to continue to grow exposure for the team and the league.
WNBA attendance and viewership are surging — a trend that goes back as far as 2018. The league’s stars — both established (like A’ja Wilson and Sabrina Ionescu) and emerging (like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese) — are as recognizable and marketable as ever.
The Sun have long been one of the WNBA’s steadiest and most successful franchises. The goal for Rizzotti is to harness that momentum and turn a small-market success story into a brand that all of New England embraces as its own.
“There’s a hunger for access to women’s basketball throughout the New England states,” Rizzotti said. “So as much as we’re proud to be the Connecticut Sun, we don’t want to be exclusive to Connecticut.
“We want to make sure that people know that just like the New England Patriots — even the Celtics, even though they’re called the Boston Celtics, they’re celebrated throughout New England — we want to continue this proud tradition of champions throughout the New England states.”
A visit that is overdue
The Sun have set their eyes on making Connecticut’s team New England’s team, but the question is how?
Part of their strategy has been making themselves visible beyond their Uncasville, Conn., home — about 90 minutes from Boston. Whether it’s through partnerships with Lowell’s indoor football franchise, the Massachusetts Pirates, and appearing at each other’s games, or teaming with New England-based bank Fidelity to offer financial education to young women at weeklong camps. In 2023, the Sun reached a two-year agreement with NBC Sports Boston to broadcast their games.
From the time the Sun moved to Connecticut from Orlando, purchased by the Mohegan Tribe in 2003, they were anchored to a state synonymous with basketball, largely because of the success of the men’s and women’s programs at the University of Connecticut.
“For New England, I think the goal is that our games are accessible,” said Morgan Tuck, who won championships at UConn, played four of her five WNBA seasons with the Sun, and is now the team’s assistant general manager.
“It’s something that everyone can watch if you’re in the region. It doesn’t just have to make sense for Connecticut fans or fans that just come to games. We’re Connecticut, but you want to be known as New England’s team because that’s a much bigger fan base.”
Playing in the Garden gives the Sun a chance to meet fans where they’re at. How the Garden went 27 years without hosting a WNBA game is a head-scratcher to Garden and Sun officials alike.
Two years ago, the Sun wanted to learn more about the demographics of that fan base, so they dived into a Ticketmaster report to look at the data on individual ticket buyers. Identifying where their fans were coming from was an important step for Rizzotti.
“We’re trying to expand our brand, but we also want to make sure we’re paying attention to the cities that are showing out for us,” she said. “We found, when we looked for that data, that a lot of our fans were coming from the Boston area.”
Rizzotti couldn’t speak to the past, but she could explain why now made the most sense.
“We’ve got a great arena in Connecticut that we don’t have to pay a lot of money to use,” she said. “Because the Mohegan Sun owns the arena, we’re not paying a rental fee. So for us to host a game at home compared to opening up the Barclays Center [home of the New York Liberty] or Crypto Arena [home to the Sparks], we have significantly lower costs. So our margin for profit is much higher to host our games at home.
“So to give up the revenue opportunities to play a game with no guarantee that we would make money is risky. So we wanted to make sure that it was at least a break-even proposition for us — that whatever it cost us to run a game there in cost and rental fees that we would be able to make that up in ticket sales.”
Originally, the Sun were hoping for 9,000-11,000 tickets to be sold.
“Just to kind of break even,” she said.
They ended up selling more than 19,000.
“That’s almost double what we can hold in our arena, so that’s exciting,” said Sun star Alyssa Thomas. “Maybe we need a bigger venue. Maybe we’ve been underselling this for so long. So I think this is what Boston is going to bring, just to see what this franchise can really reach.”
“For us to be able to sell out, it makes it a much more profitable proposition,” Rizzotti said. “I don’t think that three years ago when I started I could’ve imagined we would sell out TD Garden, so I’m happy we waited because I think we waited for the right time, the right moment.
“If we had tried it in maybe a year that maybe women’s basketball wasn’t on the tip of everybody’s tongue or on the forefront of people’s minds, we wouldn’t have done it again. So I think our patience paid off in this instance.”
A team that draws
There is a payoff for the Garden, too. When Northeastern’s women’s hockey team lifted the Beanpot trophy in front of a crowd of 10,633 in January, that was nearly 10 times the size of the crowd at Boston College for last year’s tournament. Now, fresh off USA Gymnastics bringing back eight medals from the Paris Olympics, the Garden will host “Gold Over America” for two nights in October. Next March, the International Skating Union will bring the World Figure Skating Championships to Causeway Street.
“This remarkable turnout showcases Boston’s deep support for women’s professional basketball and our vibrant sports scene,’' said TD Garden president Glen Thornborough. “TD Garden broke attendance records with the first-ever Dunkin’ Women’s Beanpot earlier this year and we are proud to keep the momentum and immense support of women’s sport going.”
In a perfect world, the Garden would have been able to market one of the Sun’s games against the Indiana Fever and ride the wave of fans Caitlin Clark attracts from city to city. With an average attendance this season of nearly 17,000, the Fever lead the WNBA by miles. On the road, the Fever average crowds of more than 15,000.
But the Sun have been one of the jewels of the WNBA for almost all of their existence, and their recent history is no different. They’ve been to the playoffs seven straight seasons. In Thomas, their centerpiece is a player who’s been an MVP candidate three times since 2020. They went to the Finals in 2019 and 2022, and with the second-best record in the league, they have a strong chance to return this season.
Most tellingly, the Sun have consistently been among the top three teams in the league in attendance relative to the capacity of their arena. This year they’re averaging 7,649 fans a night, 82 percent of the 8,000 sets at Mohegan Sun Arena. The Sun were a no-brainer long before the Caitlin Clark boom.
Tuesday’s game already marks a few milestones for the Sun. It’s their sixth sellout of the season, along with having the third-highest attendance total in the WNBA so far this season. The ticket-sales total is also by far the highest in franchise history.
Last fall, as the WNBA announced plans to expand to a 13-team league with the addition of a franchise in the Bay Area, Celtics owner Wyc Grousbeck teased the idea of bringing a WNBA team to Boston.
“It’s hard for me to picture that, because Connecticut is the home for women’s basketball,” Tuck said. “I can’t say either way what would happen or not because there is a lot of growth and expansion that’s happening and that’s the cool part, right?
“There’s an excitement around it — like, oh, what city’s going to get a team and who’s going to be where? — that I don’t think has ever existed. So I think that part is always a good thing because it means more people are talking about it, the envelope’s being pushed a little bit, you’re kind of being forced to grow.
Outgrowing their arenas
WNBA teams have started to stretch the limits of their own facilities. The Washington Mystics average more fans (6,726) than their Entertainment and Sports Arena actually holds (4,200). Meanwhile the Fever, Aces, Dream, Wings, Sky, Sun, and Liberty are all averaging attendance that’s at least 70 percent of the capacity of their arenas.
“That’s where we are as a league,” said Sun coach Stephanie White. “We’re outgrowing the small venues.
“There was a time early in the league when almost every team was playing in an NBA arena. Then it was playing in an arena that you can fill up and grow the game. Now we’ve grown the game to where we’re outgrowing these arenas.
“So it’s exciting for us, it’s exciting for our fans, it’s exciting for our league. I think it’s a great problem to have.”
The success of the Garden game has turned a what-if into a what’s-next.
“We wanted to make sure we would be successful, but right now the plan is to have another game up there if everybody on that side of things is happy with the end result,” Rizzotti said. “Hopefully selling it out in itself is the first sign that it’s going to be a big success.”
Rizzotti put it in perspective: There are only 12 cities in America where people can watch professional women’s basketball. Adding a game in Boston makes it 13. The Sun want to seize the opportunity for growth.
“We want fans to be excited about that,” she said. “We want to confirm that this is the time for continued attention and TV media rights deals and potential expansion throughout the United States, because people are all in on women’s sports.
“So I think that playing here and selling out confirms that, but for us it’s also about making sure that those people walk out of that building and they remember who the Connecticut Sun are.”
Julian Benbow can be reached at julian.benbow@globe.com.