Comets Tina Thompson, left, Sheryl Swoopes, center and MVP Cynthia Cooper, right, raise up the Comets’ 3 championship trophies during the Comets’ victory parade through downtown Houston in September 1999.
Steve Ueckert/Houston Chronicle
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In both our rafters and our memories, the history of the greatest women’s basketball franchise ever has been gathering dust for far too long.
So when reader Amanda W. asked when the Houston Comets are coming back, after the Fertitta family announced it was buying the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun and relocating them to Houston, it sent me down a rabbit hole of not just the return itself but how the best professional sports team this city has ever seen was undone by a combination of bad luck and worse ownership, dismantled so quickly that nothing was left but four championship banners hanging in the Toyota Center and, now, the strange irony of the Sun, the very team the original Comets beat in their last game in Houston on Sept. 9, 2008, shedding its identity to become them.
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But before we get to the comeback, we have to talk about the collapse.
How did the original Comets end?
About as badly as you’d expect for a basketball franchise that was handed off to a furniture salesman.
In January 2007, founding owner Les Alexander, who also owned the Rockets, sold the Comets to Houston furniture retailer Hilton Koch for $10 million. (Just imagine if Mattress Mack had bought them.)
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That first year was a disaster, the beginning of the end for a team that had dominated the WNBA and missed the playoffs only once in its history. The Comets started the 2007 season 0-10, missed the playoffs and, by Christmas, Koch announced he was moving them out of Toyota Center next season and into the smaller Reliant Arena to cut costs. That’s right; he put the greatest WNBA team ever in the building where the rodeo hosts its horse shows.
The next season was no better. With attendance declining and the team middling, the Comets finished 17-17 and missed the playoffs again. In one final indignity, Hurricane Ike forced their last “home” game to Texas State’s Strahan Coliseum in San Marcos on Sept. 15, making that Sept. 9 win against the Sun the last time the original Comets played in Houston.
Koch had put the team back up for sale that year at the same price he bought it for, and no one seemed inclined to take the deal. So, the WNBA took over operations and, on Dec. 1, 2008, announced the franchise was done.
In the next day’s edition of the Houston Chronicle, a story on the demise of the Comets took up a small corner of the front page, while the top story was, “OFFICIALLY, WE’RE IN A RECESSION.”
Players were dispersed to other teams a week later, and just like that, the Comets scattered across the sky, leaving behind the twinkle of collective nostalgia in those who watched them shine and an inherited longing in later generations who grew up knowing not the team itself but simply that this city had once been graced by greatness.
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When are the Comets coming back to Houston?
The Fertitta family, stewards of the Rockets, an empire of restaurants best known for either their meme value or their price tags (Seriously, why does the Katy Mills Rainforest Cafe have a dish called Python Pasta, and why is it $23.49?), of every Golden Nugget casino from Las Vegas to Biloxi, of a handful of hotels and amusement parks and aquariums and, as a side project, of America’s diplomatic relations with Italy, purchased the Connecticut Sun from the Mohegan Tribe for a record $300 million earlier this year. The WNBA Board of Governors unanimously approved the sale and relocation this month.
The Sun will finish out the 2026 season in Connecticut before moving to Houston, rebranding as the Comets and starting their comeback tour at the Toyota Center in 2027, right underneath those banners that have been waiting nearly two decades for their team (or any WNBA team, apparently) to play beneath them again.
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With the WNBA season usually running from May to October, we’ve got about a year’s wait ahead of us. So, I’ll see y’all there next spring.
What is your Houston question?