Portland Fire's Inaugural Season: Filling the Moda Center
The Portland Fire didn’t crash the playoff party in their inaugural season. They did something arguably more important.
They filled the building.
Back from the ashes and playing under a new banner, the rekindled Portland Fire closed out Year 1 ranked fourth in league attendance, drawing more than 14,500 fans per game to the Moda Center. For a first-year team built largely from players with something to prove, that kind of backing turned every home date into a statement about what women’s basketball means in this city.
Portland has long wrapped its arms around women’s sports, so the numbers don’t shock anyone who’s watched this market closely. The surprise came in the texture of it: not just how many people showed up, but how they showed up. Night after night, the lower bowl filled early, noise rising well before tipoff, a steady drumbeat of belief for a roster that, on paper, wasn’t supposed to scare anybody.
Center Megan DiLeo — known to many fans from earlier stops as Megan Gustafson — gave that identity a name. She called the Fire “a bunch of overlooked players,” and in that phrase you could hear the spine of the project. This was a team stitched together from athletes who’d been doubted, shuffled, or simply ignored elsewhere. In Portland, they found something different.
DiLeo has been blunt about it: she never felt fully respected as an athlete until she arrived in the Rose City. That’s not a small admission from a player who has already logged serious professional miles. It tells you what the Fire have built in a short span — not just a roster, but a refuge.
The Moda Center quickly stopped feeling like a neutral arena and started to feel like a home gym with its own mythology. The players gave it a name: “The Fire Pit.” It fit. The building crackled on game nights, a place where a team still figuring itself out could lean on volume and warmth when the basketball got messy.
They didn’t always get the result. That’s the reality of an expansion group trying to carve out an identity in a league of established contenders. There were cold shooting nights, blown leads, and lessons learned the hard way. But whether they walked off with a win or a bruise, the energy inside the Fire Pit barely dipped. The crowd roared for hustle plays, for charges taken, for the overlooked center sealing her defender and finishing through contact.
To unpack what this first season really meant, you almost have to step back from the box scores. Two lifelong women’s basketball devotees — OPB business reporter Kyra Buckley and Rev Shines, host of “Today’s Good News” on KMHD — have done exactly that, helping frame the Fire’s debut campaign as something larger than a simple win-loss ledger.
They see the joys: a new team planting roots in a city already fluent in women’s hoops, a fan base that treated every home game like an event, and players who finally felt seen. They see the challenges too: the grind of building chemistry on the fly, the frustration of missing the postseason, the pressure that comes with proving this isn’t a one-year novelty.
The Fire leave Year 1 without a playoff run, but with something that can be harder to manufacture — relevance, resonance, and a building that already has a nickname and a personality. The question now isn’t whether Portland will show up.
It’s how far this “bunch of overlooked players” can go with a city firmly at their back.
