June 30, 2025
Cleveland’s road back to WNBA basketball, its brand and its future
Barlage: 'It'll be one of the best experiences in the WNBA for the players that are coming to Cleveland to represent us'
Each season, tens of thousands descend upon the NCAA Women’s Final Four. Run by the NCAA itself, the annual basketball championship takes over the city that won the rights to host it, and in 2024 that city was Cleveland, Ohio. As sold-out crowds watched Dawn Staley and the South Carolina Gamecocks lift the NCAA Championship trophy, now-WNBA owner Dan Gilbert’s Rock Entertainment Group focused on something else, and it wasn’t a $250 million dollar WNBA Cleveland bid. They focused on tennis.
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Monday’s barrage of WNBA expansion news, the most significant being the announcement of three new teams to begin playing in the league between 2028 and 2030, included Gilbert and Cleveland returning to the league after a 22-year hiatus. While the 2024 Final Four had all the makings of being a strong motivator to hop on the women’s basketball bandwagon, Rock Entertainment Group, led by its CEO Nic Barlage, was organizing Tennis In The Land.
Part of the Women’s Tennis Association calendar of events, the annual women’s tennis tournament is operated by Rock Entertainment Group, transforming the Jacob’s Pavilion music venue on the shores of the Cuyahoga River into a premier event on the hardcourt. But on the basketball side of things, Barlage and Gilbert were working on their bid for a while before college basketball fans took over the lakefront at the 2024 Final Four.
“We’ve been working on this for three years now, so we’ve been studying it, we’ve been involved,” said Barlage on Monday at the WNBA’s announcement event. “We wanted to diversify into women’s sports so then naturally over time we started looking at every sport and the WNBA rose to the top very quickly.”
The Cleveland Rockers, part of the inaugural WNBA season in 1997, were not a part of the Gilbert portfolio. At the turn of the millennium, it was Gordon Gund who brought the Cavaliers and Rockers into downtown Cleveland, but was also the one who sent the WNBA side back out.
Now, Rock Entertainment Group is in a unique position to bring a team back to a WNBA city for the first time in league history. But while the league survived early ups and downs, there is something that may not come back with Cleveland — the Rockers’ brand.
“We love what the Rockers stood for. They opened the door of opportunity for us. For us, it’s really about we’re a city on the rise, we’re a city that’s growing,” said Barlage. “The Rockers are going to be part of that decision tree, but at the end of the day we really want to be thoughtful about, what does Cleveland represent going forward.”
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Per Barlage, the process will be “thoughtful and inclusive” in which direction Cleveland opts to go branding-wise, but he is one of only a handful of people that follow “@WNBARockers” on social media.
Regardless of where the name lands, from the initial announcement in New York, the Cleveland ownership group is already showing that these are not empty words. Present for the historic day for the city and league were inaugural members of the 1997 Rockers, Rushia Brown and Janice Lawrence Braxton.
“You opened this door of opportunity almost three decades ago, and now we can’t wait to lock arms and step through it with you in this new journey,” Barlage said to the former Rockers.
Barlage and Rock Entertainment Group put time and effort into the process, and now they have a WNBA team to show for it.
“As Dan [Gilbert] likes to say ‘You’ll see it when you believe it,’” said Barlage. “And his belief and our belief in the power of sports and entertainment to unite, activate and create momentum in the communities that we serve is the foundation that has created this opportunity for today. When we put the ball in the air in 2028, Dan and the Gilbert family will invest $1.1 billion in sports and entertainment related infrastructure to Northeast Ohio since they came almost two decades ago.”
In those nearly 20 years in Cleveland, Gilbert successful rebranded the NBA’s Cavaliers and was part of resigning LeBron James, which led to a 2016 NBA Championship, the first professional sports title for a major American sport in the city since 1964.
That investment, and the clear results and support from all across Cleveland, means further investment into the WNBA. While the 2028 expansion side is getting the former Cavaliers training facility 10 miles down the highway in Independence, Ohio, the team will transform it following the 2027 NBA season to be ready for March 2028. That is when the first Cleveland WNBA player will step onto its court.
“Our infrastructure is ready-made for this,” said Barlage. “We can’t wait to get to work on it and it’ll be one of the best experiences in the WNBA for the players that are coming to Cleveland to represent us.”
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At the end of the day though, REG joined the WNBA because it is good business. Cleveland will join the league after multiple seasons of year-over-year growth in attendance, ratings and length of schedule. After it took the league 17 years to expand to Golden State for the 2025 season, Cleveland is in the middle of a five-team expansion from 2026 through 2030.
Rock Entertainment Group believes that they are not joining the league at the tail end of its growth, but consider themselves early movers.
Right now, in the league, the Golden State Valkyries are proving this point. With the highest average attendance this season and now having the largest valuation of any team in the league at $500 million dollars, businessowners like Gilbert are jumping at the opportunity to be part of the growth. And this comes to the benefit of women’s basketball fans in Ohio.
For the WNBA, Rock Entertainment Group and the fans, there is a lot to love.
“It’s no longer just a moment,” said Barlage. “It’s a movement, and we can’t wait to be part of it.”
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