VANCOUVER, B.C. — When the NBA expanded to Canada, adding the Toronto Raptors and Vancouver Grizzlies for the 1995-96 season, basketball was an afterthought in a country obsessed with hockey.

Some three decades later, Canadian players are making their mark on the NBA and the international scene. Led by MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the Canada Basketball men’s national team boasts a full roster of NBA players. And well after the Grizzlies moved to Memphis in 2001, the Raptors embraced the role of “Canada’s team” leading up to their 2019 NBA championship.

Now, as they prepare for their inaugural WNBA season, the expansion Toronto Tempo are hoping to have a similar impact. Although a new collective bargaining agreement must first be reached, the Tempo want to represent all of Canada from the start, playing games across the country during the 2026 season. And that could supercharge the development of women’s basketball in Canada.

“The impact that the Tempo is going to have on women’s basketball is going to be exponential,” Toronto team president Teresa Resch told ESPN. “I think you can look at what happened with the Raptors 30 years ago. The ‘Vince Carter effect.’ You hear those kids talk about — they’re not kids anymore, they’re very talented young men playing basketball and representing our country really well on the international stage — the representation is huge. The fact that you can see it, you can be it.”

Embracing the role of ‘Canada’s team’

Tempo owner Larry Tanenbaum wasted little time sharing his vision for the WNBA’s 14th franchise when the league announced expansion to Toronto 21 months ago. “This team is Canada’s team,” he declared at the May 2024 news conference.

Tanenbaum is the former longtime chairman of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, which owns the Raptors. That shared tie between the Raptors and Tempo helped shape their vision to play the same role in unifying Canada behind a team based in Toronto.

Resch, who has been the team president for the Tempo, since their launch has the experience to back it up. She helped the Raptors expand their Canadian footprint through the “NBA Canada Series,” which are preseason games held in different cities in Canada.

The Raptors first left Ontario for preseason in 2010, holding training camp in Vancouver ahead of a preseason clash against British Columbia native Steve Nash. They ramped up their efforts after Resch joined the front office in 2013, heading to B.C. for training camp every year from 2014 to 2018 while playing preseason games in each of the five largest Canadian provinces during that span.

That groundwork paid off when the Raptors broke through in 2019 after years of playoff heartbreak, winning the first Canadian championship in one of the big four American men’s pro sports leagues since MLB’s Toronto Blue Jays in 1993. (Toronto FC won MLS Cup in 2017.) Watch parties for the deciding Game 6 of the NBA Finals were held in more than 50 Canadian cities.

Having experienced that impact, Tanenbaum and Resch set out to do the same with the Tempo. This time, they have the benefit of being Canada’s only WNBA team from the start.

“What’s unique about us in this moment is when the Raptors launched, there was the Grizzlies,” Resch said. “The [Montreal] Expos were a big part of Francophone Canadian [baseball] fandom for a long time. We’re in such a unique position that from the very, very beginning we can be Canada’s team.”

Like the Raptors, the Tempo plan to play across the country. The difference is the Tempo will be playing a pair of regular-season games in both Vancouver and Montreal. Resch and GM Monica Wright Rogers announced that plan during a timeout at the first WNBA regular-season game in Canada, when the Atlanta Dream and Seattle Storm played at Vancouver’s Rogers Arena last August.

“Playing meaningful games across the country is really important to the Tempo,” Resch said. “The league understands it too. They’re very supportive.”

The support for that 2025 game reflected the excitement for women’s basketball in Vancouver. Nearly 16,000 fans turned out, and Seattle guard Skylar Diggins described the crowd as “electric.” For that night, Canadian fans treated the nearby Storm as the home team, but when the Tempo travel to Vancouver to host fellow 2026 expansion team the Portland Fire this August, they’ll have a team of their own.