How the Portland Fire marketed a basketball team with no players

How do you market a sports team without any players?

It’s an age-old question for expansion teams, and one that Kimberly Veale, SVP of marketing and communications for the WNBA’s Portland Fire, has had to answer twice in the past couple of years—she joined the Fire from 2025 expansion team the Golden State Valkyries.

This year’s expansion teams, the Fire and Toronto Tempo, had to wait even longer than usual to fill out their rosters. While the Valkyries were able to draft their first players for the 2025 season in December of 2024, CBA negotiations dragged on for months during the offseason this year, pushing the 2026 expansion draft to April.

But the Fire weren’t going to wait that long to start marketing the brand.

“There’s the brand-build piece of this that we had to navigate with the Valkyries, and then also navigate with the Fire,” Veale told Marketing Brew. “[Portland] was excited about who’s going to be on the roster, and everything that was going on in this unique scenario was completely outside of our control. For us, it was really about establishing the brand, who we were, and who we wanted to be from a community perspective.”

While Veale and her team waited to welcome their players, they leveraged other assets, like their jerseys and game schedule, early in the year to fuel the fandom into the spring. Now, with a full roster on the court, they’re leveraging player personalities, a tried-and-true team marketing tactic, to further grow brand equity in a city that’s growing into a strong women’s sports hub.

Fan the flames

Unlike most expansion teams, the Fire isn’t a brand-new franchise, technically speaking, as Portland had a WNBA team with the same name from 2000 to 2002. That history meant that Veale’s approach to brand-building was more about “integrating ourselves back into the Portland community 24 years later,” she told us, rather than starting from scratch.

To start generating—or regenerating—the hype, the team debuted its jerseys in January. The Fire tapped its NBA counterpart, the Trail Blazers, to help promote the jerseys, a strategy Veale said she learned from her time with the Valkyries.

The schedule release, a significant date on the calendar for many leagues, served as another major content moment for the team even before it had a roster. The Fire worked with Portlandia stars Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen for a sketch to announce its schedule to the tune of the show’s theme song. Veale said she wasn’t entirely sure the approach would land, given Portlandia ended in 2018, but it ultimately went over well with fans—extremely well, if ticket sales are any indication.

“You hear all the stats about thousands and thousands of season-ticket deposits, and what Portland’s passion and tenure is as a notable women’s sports city, but for me, in that moment, I was like, ‘Wow, okay, check, I get this now,’” she said.

Drinking from the firehose

Then, finally, the expansion draft was held April 3, allowing the Fire and the Tempo to each select 11 players from existing teams. It was a major moment for the entire organization, the marketing team included, Veale said.

“Now we’ve got this roster overnight,” she said. “We go from zero to 11 players, and all of a sudden…we have a lot of personality on the team. That is really something we’re trying to capture quickly.”

Megan Gustafson, whom the Fire signed in mid-April, has a pet Corgi named Pancake who’s starred in some of the team’s recent social content, and the Fire has been posting other personality-oriented videos like rapid-fire Q&As and a “message to BookTok.” The team released their brand campaign for the season, “Legacy, Reignited,” on Monday.

There’s also plenty of on-court content designed for the “basketball purist” fans, Veale said. While that kind of die-hard fan is integral for any team, Veale said she’s also focused on attracting newer, younger basketball fans who may care about more than player performance.

As the season heats up, she says her goal is to keep growing awareness and love for the team through events like fan fests and theme nights, in addition to social content.

She has high hopes that progress will already be evident come tip-off.

“Golden State blew the doors off my expectations for that home opener,” Veale said. “I would venture a guess that I’m also going to have that same reaction of, ‘Wow’...It’s a chilling moment, in all the good ways, for what this league represents.”