There is a gym at Coca-Cola Coliseum that most people have never seen. It is underneath the main arena, past the Marlies locker room, through a hallway that smells like old rubber and fresh paint. That is where the Toronto Tempo hold their first practice tomorrow morning. Nineteen players. One court. Three weeks until opening night.
I have been covering the Tempo since the franchise was announced. I wrote about the expansion draft from inside the building. I wrote about the Mabrey core designation from a coffee shop on Queen Street. This is the column where we stop writing about what the team might be and start watching what it is.
Here is what I am looking for in the first week of camp.
The Mabrey-Sykes backcourt. This is the pairing the franchise is built around. Mabrey creates. Sykes defends. On paper, they complement each other perfectly. On a court, we need to see how they communicate in transition, how they handle switches on the defensive end, and whether Mabrey can run pick-and-roll with Kliundikova at WNBA speed. Mabrey ran those sets in Connecticut. The Tempo run a different system. The reads are different. The timing is different. Day 1 of camp is when Mabrey and Sandy Brondello start building that language.
Kia Nurse's role. Nurse is the first Canadian player on the Tempo roster. She is also a three-time Olympian, a career 35 percent three-point shooter, and a player who has started over 100 WNBA games. She is not coming to Toronto for sentimental reasons. She is coming because she can still play. The question is where. Brondello can use Nurse as the third guard, the backup two, or a small-ball three depending on the matchup. Nurse's camp will tell us which version Brondello wants.
Kiki Rice at the six spot. Rice was the sixth overall pick. She is the Tempo's first-ever draft selection. She played four years at UCLA and ran one of the best college programs in the country. None of that matters now. What matters is whether she can earn minutes behind Mabrey and Sykes. The Tempo do not need Rice to start. They need her to be reliable for 12 minutes a night. If she can give Brondello a clean 12 minutes without turnovers, she is in the rotation. If she presses, she sits.
Temi Fagbenle in the post. Fagbenle signed a one-year, $1 million deal. That is serious money for an expansion team. She is a skilled center who can pass out of the post and shoot from the midrange. She is not Kliundikova. She does not need to be. Fagbenle gives the Tempo a second unit that can run half-court offense without Mabrey on the floor. That is valuable. The question is conditioning. Fagbenle played overseas last season and the WNBA pace is faster than European leagues. The first week of camp will tell us if she is ready for 20 minutes a night.
The defensive identity. Brondello has said repeatedly that she wants the Tempo to be a defensive team first. Sykes makes that possible on the perimeter. Kliundikova makes it possible in the paint. But defense is a team sport and expansion teams historically struggle to build defensive chemistry because the players have never played together. The first scrimmage is where I start watching. Can these five players rotate correctly? Can they communicate switches? Can they build the habits that take most teams a full training camp to develop?
The Dara Mabrey subplot. Marina's sister signed a training camp deal on April 15. She is a guard from Notre Dame who shot 40 percent from three in college. She is not guaranteed a roster spot. The basketball decision is straightforward: is she one of the 12 best players in camp? The human story is more complicated. Cutting your franchise player's sister in the first week is a decision nobody wants to make. Keeping her when a better player is available is a decision nobody should make. Brondello will handle this correctly. He always does.
I will be at Coca-Cola Coliseum tomorrow for the first session. The gym seats maybe 200 people. The media section is six folding chairs. That is fine. The size of the room is not the point. The point is that a WNBA team is practicing in Canada for the first time. That sentence still gives me something I cannot quite name.
Opening night is May 8. Washington Mystics. 7:30 PM at Coca-Cola Coliseum. The Tempo Report goes weekly that day. Between now and then, there are roster cuts, a preseason game or two, and the small daily decisions that turn nineteen players into twelve and twelve players into a team. That part starts tomorrow.
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