Toronto Tempo Analytics Report
Measuring the WNBA's newest expansion franchise against 15 years of championship data.
Overview
In June 2026, the Toronto Tempo launched as the WNBA's first non-US franchise, a historic arrival for the league's 30th season, which has now expanded to 15 teams. This project is built around two questions: what makes a WNBA team championship-caliber, and how can the Toronto Tempo realistically get there?
The Tempo are a unique case study: a new franchise that hired Sandy Brondello (two championships as a head coach), drafted Kiki Rice at #6, and committed to the league's first million-dollar backcourt, all while the Golden State Valkyries just proved an expansion team can make the playoffs in Year 1.
This isn't a prediction or a prescription. It's a framework, one that uses historical WNBA patterns to think about what contender-level basketball actually looks like, and where the Tempo fit into that picture.
What the Analysis Covers
- Contender Scoring: a five-part model assessing championship readiness across every WNBA franchise
- Player Archetypes: an eight-category system classifying roster composition, applicable to any team
- Champion Blueprint: statistical traits shared by title-winning teams from 2010 to 2025
- Tempo Gap Analysis: where the expansion roster currently falls short of contender-level benchmarks
- 2028 Projection: free-agency recommendations and a multi-year trajectory model
Methodology
The analysis draws on 15+ years (2010 to 2025) of league data, the most stable format the WNBA has run, holding at 12 teams for most of that span before the Golden State Valkyries expanded it to 13 in 2025 and the Tempo and Portland Fire made it 15 this season.
About 67MB of historical data was scraped and processed with pandas and beautifulsoup4, then analyzed with matplotlib, seaborn, and scikit-learn. The full pipeline compiles into a standalone, interactive HTML report, viewable in any browser with no Python install required.
Links
The full analysis notebook and interactive HTML report are both available under notebooks/ in the project repository.