The Portland Fire have signed Nigeria women’s national team captain Amy Okonkwo to a standard WNBA contract, the team announced Tuesday.
The 29-year-old forward joins the Fire under the league’s Season-Ending Injury Exception as a replacement for Sarah Ashlee Barker, who is out for the rest of the season with a torn ACL.
Okonkwo cut short her stint with the Nigeria national team (D’Tigress), which is in training camp ahead of the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup.
She had been in Chicago with the squad and played in the first of Nigeria’s two warm-up games against China before returning to the United States to join Portland. She practiced with her new teammates on Tuesday
