Washington Mystics spotlight Toronto Tempo's $50 million WNBA entry
Washington Mystics is not on the floor here, but the number attached to Toronto’s arrival is already loud: the Tempo paid a $50 million entry fee to join the WNBA. The league’s first franchise in Canada then had to build a roster, hire staff and get ready for a May 8 game on a 35-day clock.
Toronto Tempo and Monica Wright Rogers
Monica Wright Rogers said the team had no players on its roster less than three weeks before a late-April meeting in Toronto. She was hired about a month and a half after Dec. 4, 2024, when Toronto officially became an expansion franchise, and she called the race to assemble a competitive group in 35 days exactly what it sounded like.
"I told my husband, ‘Can you call my mom? Let her know I’m alive?’" Wright Rogers said in that Wednesday meeting. The line landed because the job had already moved from paperwork to survival mode: a new team, a new staff and a starting point with nothing in place on the roster.
April 3 expansion draft
The expansion draft on April 3 gave Toronto its first major roster piece, with Marina Mabrey selected sixth overall. By WNBA All-Star weekend in July 2025, the core basketball operations group was in place, but the early build still carried the pressure of arriving fast and getting it right.
"While it’s very exciting to have Canada behind us and everybody’s excited, there’s an expectation level that comes with it," Mabrey said after the draft. "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."
Toronto’s wider WNBA push
Toronto’s place in the league is bigger than one roster move. The Tempo are the first WNBA franchise in Canada, backed by Larry Tanenbaum and Judy Tanenbaum, and expected to represent a nation of 41 million people while the WNBA plans three more expansion clubs by 2030.
Those three clubs are expected to bring in a total of $750 million in expansion fees, which puts Toronto’s $50 million entry fee inside a much larger growth push. For the Tempo, the practical next step was never abstract: build the group, set the standard and be ready for May 8.
