Marina Mabrey is at the free throw line at Coca-Cola Coliseum with 32 seconds on the clock. The Tempo trail by one. The crowd, all 8,210 of them, is on its feet. Mabrey takes the first dribble that every shooter takes before a free throw. She makes the first one. Tie game. She makes the second one. Toronto leads, 65-64. The building goes louder than I have heard anything in a Toronto basketball arena that did not have a championship trophy on the line.
That is the high point. The low point is the next thirty-two seconds.
Shakira Austin gets fouled inside on Washington's possession. She makes both free throws. Tempo trail by one. Mabrey misses on the offensive end. Austin gets fouled again. She makes both free throws. Mystics lead by three with eight seconds left. Toronto's last possession dies in Sykes's hands at the top of the key when she cannot get separation for a clean look at three. Final: Washington 68, Toronto 65.
That is the basketball. Now the rest of it.
Brittney Sykes scored the first basket in regular-season Tempo history. It was a mid-range pull-up over Sonia Citron about two minutes into the game, and it was exactly the kind of shot Sykes will hit fifty times this season. The crowd lost its mind anyway. There is something specific about the first time a city sees a player it has been waiting for actually do the thing she was hired to do. Sykes finished with fourteen points and looked like the defensive identity the front office sold her as.
Julie Allemand hit the first three-pointer in regular-season Tempo history a few minutes later. Allemand is a Belgian point guard, three-time Olympian, and probably the most underrated guard on this roster. She had nine assists and zero turnovers in twenty-two minutes. She did not score much. She made every single thing the Tempo did on offense better while she was on the floor. Watch her.
Mabrey finished with ten points on three-of-eleven shooting. The shooting line is not what you want from your franchise tag. The two free throws with thirty-two seconds left are. She has played eight years in this league and she has been at that line in tight games for seven of them, and the thing she did was make both shots when the building was about to come apart. Brondello will take that every time.
Kiki Iriafen had six points and ten rebounds for Washington. Lauren Betts had four points and seven rebounds in twenty-one minutes. The Mystics outrebounded Toronto 41-32. That is the question I wrote about in the preview yesterday and it is the question that will define this team's first month. Toronto does not have a frontcourt anchor. Fagbenle played twenty-four minutes and got beat up on the offensive glass. Harrison gave them eighteen and looked tired by minute fifteen. Maria Kliundikova, the player who would have solved this, is in Russia.
Kiki Rice played eleven minutes and looked like a rookie still figuring out the spacing of WNBA pick-and-roll. She also threw the prettiest skip pass of the night to Sykes for a corner three in the third quarter. The pass got a louder reaction than the basket. That is going to be a thing this season — the moments the crowd notices because it is paying attention to the tell, not the result.
The crowd. I have written about Toronto Raptors crowds at the Air Canada Centre for fifteen years. This was different. Smaller, obviously. Younger, mostly. Almost entirely women and girls in the lower bowl, with families and small groups of teenage athletes who had clearly come together. The first time Mabrey was announced in the starting lineup, the noise registered higher than anything I have heard from a Raptors regular season crowd in March. That is not hyperbole. I had a decibel reader app open on my phone for the first quarter and the peak read 102 dB at tipoff. The Air Canada Centre's average peak in a regular season Raptors game is closer to 95.
What this loss tells us. The Tempo are a real basketball team. They held a championship-caliber Mystics frontcourt to 68 points. They were within a single possession with eight seconds left in their first ever regulation contest. The defensive identity Brondello has been building since training camp is real and visible. The frontcourt depth issue is also real and visible. Both can be true.
The schedule does not stop. Toronto is at New York on Sunday night. The Liberty just dismantled Connecticut by 31 in their opener. The Tempo will not win that game. They will probably lose it by 15 or 20. That is fine. The first two weeks of any season for any expansion team are about figuring out which lineups can compete for full possessions and which ones are getting outclassed. We learn more about this team by watching them lose to New York than we did by watching them lose to Washington.
Tonight is a road night. Pick up the Tempo Report on Monday morning for the full read on what week one told us. Until then: we lost. We were here. The building was. That is enough.
[ End Report ]