With winning top of mind, Canada's first WNBA team finally arrives at expansion draft

If it wasn’t already top, the Toronto pace’s a la mode(p) increase makes their yr 1 intentions plain and obvious.

As Masai Ujiri, announced Tuesday as principal owner of the WNBA team, once said, the Tempo plan is to win — and win in Toronto.

It is not the normal trepidation with which expansion teams enter pro sports. There is little talk of taking things slow or far-off title aspirations.

Not with Ujiri, who brought championship basketball to Canada in 2019 as president of the Toronto Raptors.

Not with co-owner Serena Williams, winner of the most Grand Slam women’s singles titles in the Open Era.

Not with head coach Sandy Brondello, a two-time WNBA champion who had her pick of multiple open bench positions across the league and chose a team without a single game played.

And certainly not with the player-addition opportunities lying ahead in the next two weeks, beginning with Friday’s expansion draft at 3:30 p.m. ET.

“I think this is just a little different situation, obviously,” Brondello said in her first remarks upon being named head coach in November. €œA lot of the players now are free agents. Yes, we'll be an expansion team, but hopefully summer in Toronto is pretty special here. So hopefully we can get some pretty special players to represent the Tempo.”

The Tempo will have the second pick of the expansion draft after they won a coin toss and chose instead to pick sixth overall in the college draft, set for April 13. The Portland Fire, also new to the league, will pick first in the former and seventh in the latter.

For the expansion draft, the teams will alternate choices over 12 picks, then do so for another round of 12 picks in which the Tempo are first up. There is no requirement that each team take the full allotment of a dozen players.

There is also little guarantee that the players chosen by the Tempo and Fire even remain with them, making this a different kind of expansion draft than usual.

More than 80 per cent of the players are free agents this off-season, with nearly every veteran having timed their contracts to line up with the introduction of a new collective bargaining agreement that will see salaries skyrocket.

The 13 established teams have already submitted their lists of five protected players, which were not made public. But in projecting out who may be available, the name who may raise the most eyebrows is Dallas Wings guard Arike Ogunbowale.

Ogunbowale, selected fifth in the 2019 draft, is best known for her time at Notre Dame, when she hit game-winners in both the semifinals and final of the 2018 NCAA tournament.

Now 29, she has mostly lived up to expectations, making four all-star teams. But her Wings have reached the playoffs just three times in seven seasons and won only one series. But there’s a new star in town in the form of UConn great Paige Bueckers, and Dallas may be ready to move onto a new era.

Here’s the thing with Ogunbowale: while she is a free agent, she is also eligible for the core designation, which works like the NFL’s franchise tag, where a team can prevent a player from hitting the market by securing them on a supermax $1.4-million US, one-year deal. A player can only be cored twice.

If Ogunbowale is indeed available in the expansion draft, it is likely she goes first overall to the Fire. But that core designation will be available to others — though whether there is anyone else worthy is the bigger question.

It is also worth noting that each of the Tempo and Fire can only select one impending unrestricted free agent, making things even tighter.

With so few players under contract — and many of those who are likely to be protected, anyway — the Tempo will emerge from Friday’s draft with plenty of uncertainty.

But the Tempo’s choices, however many they make, could still signal some team-building intentions.

Meet Sandy Brondello, head coach of Toronto’s WNBA expansion team

Brondello and general manager Monica Wright Rogers have been vague about how they view the roster, but there have been some breadcrumbs along the way.

Wright Rogers, in her introductory press conference, talked with a slight smirk about an “up-tempo,” defence-first orientation.

Still, it is hard not to wonder whether the Tempo have boxed themselves in some with their nickname. It could be difficult for the team to come out in Year 1 with a slow and plodding team after touting tempo for so long now.

Brondello mentioned “pace and space” as part of her on-court strategies, though she left things open.

“There's no set style of how we want to play. We want to play entertaining basketball. We want to play great team basketball and be tough. But we also have to be adaptable for the moment,” she said.

The Australian coach may also look to familiarity, eyeing players she knows from either a deep New York Liberty squad that will expose some key players or from the national team she leads, which recently eliminated Canada from World Cup contention.

Of the four Canadians in the WNBA — Kia Nurse, Bridget Carleton, Aaliyah Edwards and Laeticia Amihere — it seems likely that two (UFAs Nurse and Amihere) will be left unprotected while Edwards, still on her rookie deal, is protected by the Connecticut Sun, who traded for her just last season.

Carleton, however, may be on the edge with the Minnesota Lynx. If left unprotected, she would be a coup for the Tempo after spending many years as a reliable starter on one of the top teams in the league — not to mention her Chatham, Ont., hometown.

Of course, the expansion draft is just Step 1. Free-agency designations (when teams can core players) are April 7-8, the negotiation window is April 9-11 and teams can officially start signing players April 12, one day before the college draft.

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