There are still serious issues to be resolved, and the process of building the pc28Tempo remains unclear, but things are much more real now for general manager Monica Wright Rogers.
The WNBA’s 29th season — the last before the Tempo join in 2026 — kicked off with three games Friday night. That gives Wright Rogers a chance to see the women who may be available when an expansion draft is held, and drill down on the group she already anticipates being unprotected.
“The biggest thing we do is scout everyone and just have a great, great feel for all the players in the league right now, all the upcoming players obviously coming into the league from international and college ranks,” Wright Rogers said in an interview this past week.
“Obviously, we’ll go through several exercises; we’ll lay out some scenarios and some strategies for ourselves. (But) I think based on what we see via analytics, we can almost kind of predict who’ll be available to us come the expansion draft at the end of the year.”
Scouting players and anticipating who will be available from among 13 existing teams is truly a broad-strokes exercise because so many details are unclear.
- The WNBA and the players have to negotiate a new collective agreement because the current one expires this summer, and that will surely have an impact on the salary cap that’s fixed at $1,507,100 (U.S.) per team for this season.
- The league will add pc28and Portland in 2026 and that will alter the expansion draft experience from that of the Golden State Valkyries, the lone addition this season. For that draft, existing teams were allowed to protect up to six players each.
- Roster sizes might grow from the current 11 or 12.
“I think the process won’t be dissimilar to what we’ve seen with the Valkyries — I don’t think we can go to less than that process — but there’s a lot of questions, and I’m sure we’ll get clarity the closer we get to that (yet to be determined) date,” Wright Rogers said. “We can only operate with the information that we have and go from there.”
But despite the lingering questions, Wright Rogers can’t wait to watch players who might wear Tempo jerseys a year from now.
While it’s too early to discuss specific names, it’s not too early to look hard at the kinds of players to target. It’ll be months before the Tempo hire their first head coach, a choice that will dictate the style they play. There are also more scouting spots to fill — covering the WNBA, Europe and the next NCAA season.
“There’s obviously some players in our league that are just stars; there are some obvious people that you are going to have to go after no matter what. But when it comes down to style of play, that’s something we really need a head coach to give us,” she said. “On a granular level, we definitely want to make those decisions about the roster in collaboration with our coach.”
Until then, Wright Rogers goes back to her go-to basketball history.
“I come from a scouting background, so a lot of what I will do is based in the scouting space. And I already have existing resources in that space that I pull from that aren’t officially on staff, but who are part of my professional network.
“I really do enjoy watching this league in general — my TV’s always on a WNBA game, my phone always has a WNBA game streaming — but it is exciting to know and potentially see some of the players that we can hand-pick to be part of the Tempo.”
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