Large Sports Website – can wordpress support it?

I’m researching the viability of moving a large sports website which currently uses a bespoke CMS (that only 1 developer knows) over to wordpress.

Our Developer has expressed concern:-
Two different pages that wordpress can generate, static and dynamic. Static page are pages that do not get updated very much and then the dynamic pages that pull data from the database and then display the content.
The problem that I do see, is that the website gets over 1million page views per month. If this is build in wordpress it will go to the database everytime someone is loading any page. This can result in the database crashing on high load from traffic on the website.
There are some plug-ins that can be used to create static pages, but if sections needs to be generated where there are more than 25 000 stories per section, the server will come under severe load.
There is also a section on the website – the right column that contains an updated section with the latest stories included. This section contains round-about 25 000 story pages. This right column is a PHP include. If this is a static page and the latest news needs to be included, all 25 000 story must be re-generated to contain this section. And the story pages will always increase as time goes on.

Can you help us? Are there success stories with large news generated websites having succesfully used wordpress. We also use XML to pull in stories.

Help HUGELY appreciated – thank you

Alice