{"id":770245,"date":"2026-06-25T14:06:14","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T14:06:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/770245\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T14:06:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T14:06:14","slug":"tempo-check-a-deep-dive-into-torontos-recent-road-trip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/770245\/","title":{"rendered":"Tempo Check: A deep dive into Toronto\u2019s recent road trip"},"content":{"rendered":"

They say home is where the heart is; the Toronto Tempo<\/a> might say home is where the wins are.<\/p>\n

Life on the road hasn\u2019t been easy for the Tempo in the team\u2019s inaugural season. Toronto returned from its most recent three-game road trip with a 1-2 record. A 113-91 defeat to the Indiana Fever preceded an impressive 101-97 comeback win over the Connecticut Sun, keyed by a record-setting 37 points from Marina Mabrey, but the comeback magic exhausted itself in a trip-ending 94-87 loss to the Atlanta Dream (in which the Tempo trailed 33-15 after the first quarter).<\/p>\n

The Tempo are just 4-6 on the road, compared to 4-3 at home, and have suffered key injuries away from Coca-Cola Coliseum. Rookie sensation Kiki Rice went down with a Grade 3 ankle sprain in a June 3 loss at New York, while this tour of the States saw Brittney Sykes, the WNBA\u2019s fifth-leading scorer (20.1 points per game), suffer a plantar fascia injury in the June 16 loss at Indiana.<\/p>\n

Both will have plenty of time to rest up at home in the coming weeks: the Tempo won\u2019t have to break out the passports for another month, next leaving Canada for a July 28 game at Minnesota. The Tempo will, however, play in three arenas in Canada during the homestand: the usual Coca-Cola home for most games, Scotiabank Arena for a June 27 \u201cPlay With Pride\u201d game against the Phoenix Mercury, and the Bell Centre in Montr\u00e9al as part of the team\u2019s Cross Canada series for a weekend in mid-July. (Both Sykes and Rice are, per TSN\u2019s Chelsea Leite<\/a>, making progress already.)<\/p>\n

What can we learn about the upcoming homestand from what the Tempo showed in this recent three-game stretch and the season at large? Let\u2019s dive in.<\/p>\n

Injuries, epitomized by this road trip\u2019s victimization of Sykes, have had a serious effect. Key backcourt pieces Sykes, Rice, and Julie Allemand, as well as veteran bigs Temi F\u00e1gb\u00e9nl\u00e9, Isabelle Harrison, and Nyara Sabally, have all missed multiple games. According to Lucas Seehafer\u2019s WNBA Injury Tracker<\/a> on The IX Sports<\/a>, the Tempo have lost more games to injury than the average team, and few teams can compete with the impact of said injuries on so many key rotation pieces. The lineup of Sykes, Mabrey, Rice, F\u00e1gb\u00e9nl\u00e9, and rookie Laura Ju\u0161kait\u0117\u2014an intriguing lineup with everyone healthy\u2014has played just two minutes together all season, according to WNBA.com<\/a>, and other viable lineups haven\u2019t yet had meaningful run.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure that the Tempo\u2019s playstyle is quite settled, as a result. Toronto ranked second in the WNBA<\/a> in offensive rating (points per 100 possessions) and led the league<\/a> in three-point rate through the first month of the season. Since the beginning of June and Rice\u2019s injury, the Tempo\u2019s three-point rate has dropped from 42.6% to 36.7%.<\/p>\n

The Tempo are still a team careful with its shot selection. The highest-value shots are those at the rim and from three, and the Tempo rank third in the league in percentage of shots taken from those areas (72.12%, per pbpstats<\/a>). Free throws are also high-value; Sykes ranks third in the league in free throws attempted per game (I don\u2019t mind using a per game number here as opposed to a rate; although it doesn\u2019t adjust for pace, I think it\u2019s somewhat indicative of Sykes\u2019 effect on Toronto\u2019s third-ranked pace<\/a>). Both Sykes and Mabrey have taken midrange shots\u2014the domain of, ideally, only the most skilled shot-makers\u2014at a higher rate than anyone else on the Tempo, but the two have been the key cogs of the offence as a whole.<\/p>\n

Sykes has been Toronto\u2019s best dribble-drive threat, with an explosive first step and an ability to finish through contact at the rim, as well as the skill to create her own shot from deep:<\/p>\n

Mabrey has led the Tempo in usage rate at 29.2 % (usage rate is the percentage of on-court possessions ended, by shooting, turning the ball over, or drawing free throws; it does not take assists into account). Much of the Tempo offence is designed to get Mabrey open off screens or enable her to create her own shot in the pick-and-roll, which she can do in as tight a window as any player in the league:<\/p>\n

The Tempo\u2019s offence is at its best, however, when Sykes and Mabrey\u2019s offensive gravity create looks that Toronto wants. Consider these three plays:<\/p>\n

In the first, Mabrey\u2019s dribble penetration gets two feet into the paint, causing the defence to collapse and creating an easy dump off to F\u00e1gb\u00e9nl\u00e9 for a high-value at-rim look (per pbpstats, shots at the rim are made at a 63 per cent clip this year). Then, Mabrey\u2019s three-point gravity\u2014she tied a WNBA record with nine made threes in this very game against the Sun\u2014has Connecticut hard hedging<\/a> her, putting two on the ball; Mabrey finds the outlet, giving Toronto a 4-on-3 advantage, and the offence \u201cout-passes\u201d the rotation (the ball moves faster than the defenders) to net a corner three. Finally, and perhaps most demonstratively, the Tempo\u2019s double drag action<\/a> gets Sykes downhill, which the defence is forced to respect; the low weakside defenders \u201ctags<\/a>\u201c the rolling Harrison, but Mabrey\u2019s defender, worried about Mabrey\u2019s three-point threat, doesn\u2019t \u201dhelp the helper<\/a>,\u201d leaving the tagger\u2019s matchup (Ju\u0161kait\u0117) open for another corner three.<\/p>\n

The three-point shooting is critical. While we\u2019ll save an exploration of Toronto\u2019s Four Factors<\/a> for another time, it\u2019s notable now that the Tempo are 6-3 when winning the three-pointers-made battle. (I want to be clear that these are just the box score stats, not the Four Factors.)<\/p>\n

Toronto\u2019s ability, by design and by freelance ability, to put pressure on the rim will open up their three-point shooting, and, vice versa, their three-point shooting will keep open lanes to the rim. That\u2019s the synergy that Sykes, Mabrey, and the offence as a whole have started to flash, but it\u2019s synergy not yet fully realized.<\/p>\n

Like the offence, the defence hasn\u2019t been at the level the Tempo would like. Toronto is third-last in the league in defensive rating, allowing 111.1 points per 100 possessions, and the road losses to Atlanta and Indiana\u2014the W\u2019s first- and sixth-ranked offences, respectively\u2014demonstrated how much room Toronto has to grow.<\/p>\n

If, philosophically, Toronto wants to be taking shots at the rim and from three, those are the exact shots they should want to limit defensively. The Tempo, however, rank dead last in that regard, allowing a league-high 76.51 per cent of opponent shots at the rim and from three (pbpstats). That\u2019s not necessarily a bad thing (the first-place Minnesota Lynx rank second), but Toronto lets teams get to the rim at the highest rate in the W (39.86 per cent rim frequency) and allows opponents to finish at the rim at the third-highest efficiency in the league (65.53 per cent, almost 10 per cent higher than the Lynx). Those numbers could be a function of schedule, with the Tempo already playing nine games against the five highest rim-rate teams in the league, but teasing out cause and effect here is less important than getting more stops.<\/p>\n

The Fever loss offered a litany of examples of the defence giving up wide open looks at the rim and from deep:<\/p>\n

If the point of attack defence isn\u2019t there, the rotational defence has to be. On this road trip, the rotational defence was mostly tucked into a forgotten pocket of the suitcase (the coaching staff knew it\u2014just look at head coach Sandy Brondello\u2019s sideline reaction in the very last clip).<\/p>\n

A few other numbers: Toronto is allowing second-chance points (points on chances generated by offensive rebounds) at the second-highest rate in the league, 16.7 points per 100 possessions (per WNBA.com), and the third-highest rate of offensive rebounds on opposing field goal attempts (pbpstats). They\u2019re also committing more two-point shooting fouls than any other team (11.99 per 100 possessions), and have given up 15 two-point and-ones in their last four games:<\/p>\n

Last year\u2019s Golden State Valkyries (who had a mostly available F\u00e1gb\u00e9nl\u00e9) aside, expansion teams haven\u2019t exactly been known for their defence. The Tempo\u2019s co-debutants, the Portland Fire, rank last in the league in defensive rating. Toronto has relied on a combination of veterans, rookies, and the unique-to-WNBA veteran-rookies. The veteran Harrison, in her 12th year in the league, has played 23.7 minutes per game in her seven games, up from 10.1 MPG last year. The rookie Ju\u0161kait\u0117, for example, is already much improved from game one, but is also \u201cleading\u201d the league in fouls per game, as is the nature of young players. Maria Cond\u00e9, the 29-year-old rookie, has played in Europe for over a decade and has so far played the third-most total minutes on the Tempo. Such a combination (and such a guard-heavy team) takes time to gel defensively.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why this homestand is so important: it\u2019s a chance to translate the team\u2019s mental toughness into meaningful results along the route to the post-season. Toronto has not won a game against a team with a record above .500, defeating the 8-8 Los Angeles Sparks, the struggling Phoenix Mercury, and taking two wins apiece against basement-dwellers Chicago, Connecticut, and Seattle. Of the nine games in Canada, six are against above-.500, playoff-bound squads.<\/p>\n

Toronto plays those very same Sparks tonight. The Tempo have come home; can they take heart and win, too?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They say home is where the heart is; the Toronto Tempo might say home is where the wins…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":770246,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3770],"tags":[7,6,681,680,476,44728,3820],"class_list":["post-770245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-toronto-raptors","tag-basketball","tag-nba","tag-raptors","tag-toronto","tag-toronto-raptors","tag-toronto-tempo","tag-torontoraptors"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116811135920664407","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=770245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770245\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/770246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=770245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=770245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=770245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}