Toronto Tempo general manager Monica Wright Rogers had 35 days in late April to turn an empty roster into something that could walk onto a WNBA floor and look like a team. The franchise’s first home regular-season game was set for May 8, and less than three weeks earlier the Tempo still did not have a single player.
Wright Rogers, the league’s first-ever general manager for the Toronto franchise, said the pressure hit before the public could see any of the work. “I told my husband, ‘Can you call my mom? Let her know I’m alive?’” she said of the stretch after Toronto officially became a WNBA expansion franchise on Dec. 4, 2024, when it paid a $50 million entry fee and backed the club with Larry Tanenbaum and his wife Judy. She joined the team about a month and a half later after serving as an assistant general manager for the Phoenix Mercury.
For Toronto, the sprint was not just about assembling bodies. It was about building a marketable, recognizable and professionally competitive group in a city of 41 million people spread across the country’s basketball curiosity. By late April, the Tempo were still shaping the basic structure of the roster even as the calendar kept moving toward the opener. The timeline left no room for the long lead time expansion teams usually get.
Marina Mabrey gave that urgency a voice after being selected sixth overall in the April 3 expansion draft, which gave the two new teams the basis for their rosters. “While it’s very exciting to have Canada behind us and everybody’s excited, there’s an expectation level that comes with it,” she said. “And all of us know it. We feel it. We don’t want to be the first expansion team to be getting our asses kicked. Nobody wants to be that.”
The tension in Toronto’s launch is that the league’s boldest expansion push is also its tightest. The Tempo were the first WNBA franchise in Canada, and the league has framed the move as part of a wider bet that also included the resurrected Portland Fire and, by 2030, three more WNBA expansion clubs tied to reported total fees of $750 million. Toronto’s role as the only team in Canada gave it nationwide curiosity and tied it to the league’s global ambitions from the start.
By WNBA All-Star weekend in July 2025, the core basketball operations group was in place, a sign the franchise had moved from scramble to structure. But the first test came much earlier, on May 8, when the Tempo had to show that a team built in weeks could hold up in public, not just on paper.
