When the New York Liberty parted ways with the winningest coach in franchise history less than a week after their first-round playoff exit — and just one year after hoisting a championship — Toronto Tempo fans started crossing their fingers.

Sandy Brondello wasn’t supposed to be a free agent in 2025, but when the unexpected happened, the Tempo took full advantage to secure one of the league’s very best as their first head coach.

The Australian native has 27 years of playing and coaching experience in the league.

Now at the helm in Toronto, Brondello will be a defining factor in the success of its first season. Given her inevitable impact, here’s a look at what she’ll bring to the North.

History made in multiple markets

Brondello knows how to boost teams to their brightest moments. She holds the winningest record of any coach in both New York and in Phoenix, and has taken each all the way to a title.

In her first season with the Mercury, Brondello led Phoenix to the league’s best record in 2014 and, at the time, the most single-season wins by a team, with 29. As a result, Brondello won the Coach of the Year award and took the Mercury all the way to the WNBA Finals, where they swept the Sky for the championship. For the next nine seasons, Brondello called the shots and the Mercury didn’t miss a playoff appearance. In 2021, the team and coach decided to part ways and didn’t renew her contract.

Less than a month after leaving Phoenix, Brondello signed a new contract as the head coach in New York, and just two years after that, she led the Liberty to their first WNBA Finals Championship, in 2024.

Brondello has never missed the playoffs as a coach, a fact she jokingly brought up in her first time addressing the media in Toronto, saying she plans to continue with the winning patterns she’s become known for, even as she starts off with a fresh new team.

Attracting stars to the North

In her years with the clipboard, Brondello has coached some of the greatest to ever play the game, including Diana Taurasi, Breanna Stewart, Sabrina Ionescu and Brittney Griner. Her relationship with top talent and experience as a coach helping to bring them to the greatest prize in the sport will help attract other key players — or maybe a few of these same ones — who will be free agents this off-season to Toronto.

After all, one of the reasons the Tempo team and general manager Monica Wright Rogers pursued Brondello so vigorously was because of her prestige within the league. Only two veteran players — Kalani Brown (Mercury) and Lexie Brown (Storm) — have already committed to teams for the 2026 season. All other players eligible for veteran contracts have held off from signing for the 2026 season because of current talks around the collective bargaining agreement and subsequent impending salary changes.

This means that, for the Tempo’s inaugural season, they won’t be strictly reliant on the expansion draft to build the roster, they will also need to attract, spend and sign top players. Undoubtably, Brondello’s excellence will be a huge factor in that process. Her past success brings reliability and predictability to a brand-new team in an unknown market.

Immediately following Brondello release from the Liberty, other head coaches and players complimented her coaching acumen. Becky Hammon, coach of the reigning champion Las Vegas Aces, was quick to call out the exit.

“I didn’t love it for Sandy, I have to be honest. She’s just won a championship. She’s won in other places, and I know her to be a quality coach and a quality person. Those are rare sometimes, to get that mixture of qualities as a head coach,” Hammon told ESPN reporter Alexa Philippou.

Thankfully for fans in Toronto, the Tempo turned the Liberty’s loss into their opportunity.

Rogers said she was looking for a coach with lots of experience in the league who could help balance out such a new team, and as soon as she saw Brondello was available, she got to work.

Choosing the freshest start

Brondello received formal offers from both the Seattle Storm and the Dallas Wings for their head coaching positions but made the choice to go with the Tempo.

On paper, these two teams had a lot more to offer. Two established franchises already fitted with loyal fans and brand recognition in markets where women’s basketball is proven to succeed. To top that off, the two biggest rising stars in the league are on these two rosters. Paige Bueckers just finished her first season in Dallas, where she posted an average of 19.2 points and 5.4 assists per game and won Rookie of the Year. Then, on the West Coast, there’s the lesser-known but equally — if not more — dominant Dominque Malonga, who just finished her rookie season and capped it off with All-Rookie Team honours as well.

But Brondello didn’t want anything established, even if it looked tempting on paper. Instead, she wanted the cleanest sheet possible, and with the Tempo that’s what she’ll get.

With the Tempo, Brondello is at the start of everything, a challenge she’s yet to face, even as a veteran of the league. She will navigate the expansion draft, enchant and sign the first-ever free agents, and select the first draft pick for Toronto.

The WNBA arrives in Toronto in the middle of unprecedented league success with a new U.S. media deal worth $200 million annually kicking off in 2026, and to top that off, there’s the recent unprecedented expansion-team success as well.

What the Golden State Valkyries accomplished in 2025 cannot be overlooked, and Brondello hasn’t. In her first conversations with media regarding the responsibilities of an expansion team, she acknowledged Natalie Nakase, the Valkyries head coach who won the Coach of the Year award for the team’s inaugural season, praising what she accomplished in her first summer in the Bay Area.

“They’ve hit the ground running, haven’t they? And I think they’ve done a really great job,” Brondello said. “I think Natalie’s done a great job of coaching that team up, and being Coach of the Year. So, that’s a high level to try and make sure that we stay up to, but that’s the challenge.”

Nakase made history as she led the first expansion team to make the playoffs in its inaugural year and set the record for most regular season wins by an expansion team. With such a successful run, the Valkyries showed what a new team is capable of and reset the standard that the Tempo, Portland Fire, Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia teams will aspire to in their first seasons.

For Brondello, expansion isn’t an entirely new frontier. She was drafted by the Detroit Shock when they were an expansion team, in 1998, and says she will draw on what she learned from those early years about the importance of building good relationships within a new team, and the value of connections and camaraderie.