The Toronto Tempo have a couple of rules they are trying to follow in their inaugural season, and one of them involves guard Julie Allemand and her best basketball weapon: speed.
“That’s that’s one of our rules: Don’t let Julie beat you down the floor,” head coach Sandy Brondello said earlier in the season. “Julie, she’s so important for how we want to play. You know, we like to play with pace. So with a point guard like that, who loves to push the pace, everyone else has to run because she can’t outrun them.”
Pace is a cornerstone of the Tempo’s identity. Young talent and speedy guards help the expansion team score in transition, something Toronto has shown they must do to win games.
Toronto has only won three games without key scorers Brittney Sykes and Kiki Rice — who were sidelined for most of June and July with injury. And of those three games, the two most recent wins came with a heavy dose of fast break points.
When the Tempo beat the Los Angeles Sparks on June 25, they had 20 fast break points. Then, on July 12 against the New York Liberty, they had 28. These high tallies of points in transition show the Tempo have found a way to break hard defenses; they just need strong adherence to the fundamentals to ensure speed doesn’t make them sloppy.
Last week, the Tempo played the Minnesota Lynx in back-to-back games. Though both were losses for Toronto, Tuesday’s game showed the expansion group can contend with the league leaders if they can keep the pace. Thursday’s game, however, showed the inverse.
On Tuesday, the Tempo were fast, scoring 10 points in transition. They rebounded the ball well, as all positions crashed the boards — most frequently guards. This created opportunities to move in transition. When guards come up with boards — as was the case for Maria Conde 10 times on Tuesday — it produces an increased opportunity to succeed in transition, given these are the players most likely to complete a good pass or handle their way to the opposing net.
After the game, Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve made special note of that speed.
“Their pace is terrific,” she said. “You know we told them repeatedly, ‘this team doesn’t stop moving, this team plays well after a defensive rebound, they fly up the floor.’”
Ahead of Thursday’s rematch, pace was again a main focus.
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“Hopefully, we’re fresh enough to keep doing it,” Brondello said. “That’s what we want: pace. If we can have our defense create our offense, that’s when we can get out and run. And when we’re fouling people and getting, you know, taken out of the rim, that kind of thing hurts us in some of the games where we kind of got blown out.”
Thursday, Toronto kept it close in the first quarter by making good use of points in the paint. It wasn’t impressive post-ups that got them points, but rather strong backdoor cuts and well-timed passes that opened up chances. It was exactly the kind of flow Brondello mentioned before the game.
“We’re trying to cut a little bit more because (the Lynx) are so good at their rotations and their scramble,” she said. “But you know, we want to keep the pace up.”
But Toronto couldn’t continue that effort past the first 10 minutes. Eventually, speed became slop as the Tempo lost the ball in transition more frequently than they scored. 24 turnovers later, the Tempo had suffered one of their toughest losses of the season in front of their biggest home crowd yet.
“Our habits, what breaks it down, the things we talk about, too many turnovers, and unforced turnovers, and soft turnovers, and they’re not rebounding,” Brondello said. “So the aggressor always gets the calls then, and we did not handle that well.”
To prevent that kind of deconstruction, the Tempo’s pace is best controlled by Allemand, who’s nifty passes and strong handles confuse defenses and create openings. The last three Tempo victories have come in games where Allemand totaled nine or more assists.
Conde’s strong rebounding is another key factor. When she goes after the ball, she sets up runs that catch opposing defenses behind the ball, forcing them to play catch-up.
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“I feel like we play double the possessions here, so you really have to be running a lot,” Conde said at the beginning of the season about the adjustment to playing fast with the Tempo. “It’s a lot more of a transition game, more iso games, like reading the space. So I think that was my main adjustment at the beginning; it was being able to play at that speed and make the right reach when you’re tired, because obviously you’re playing a lot faster than you used to.”
Even Marina Mabrey’s hustle plays a role.
As defenses begin to treat her as the scoring threat she’s proven to be, it’s become a challenge to find her less-contested scoring opportunities. Some of those best chances come in transition. Allemand can rack up assists on plays where Mabrey has beaten everyone else down the floor and can finish at the rim.
But when Allemand’s assists are limited, or when the Tempo can’t find a defensive rebound to get them moving in transition, their side of the scoreboard feels it.
Up next, the Tempo play back-to-back games against the Golden State Valkyries. The Valkyries are dominating in their second season, but have found success through alternate means, compared to the Tempo. The Valkyries are second-to-last in the league in fastbreak points with an average of 6.1 per game compared to the Tempo’s 11.1.
Pace, as a stat, measures how many possessions a team has per 40 minutes of play. The Valkyries, as evidenced by their low fastbreak numbers, have the slowest pace of any team in the league at 75.66. The Tempo, on the other hand, rank fourth at 81.35.
This difference in speed and play style is striking and should make for an interesting matchup this week. Will the Tempo stay true to their rules and identity, or will the Valkyries determine the speed with which both teams play?
