With CBA deadline looming, any delays would be crushing blow to Tempo’s inaugural home opener

Ever since the WNBA announced it was expanding to Toronto in May 2024, an anvil has loomed over the franchise.

In recent weeks, the shadow of the anvil — written in legalese and held by lawyers, negotiators and business types — has grown larger and larger.

By Tuesday, if the league and its players cannot come to terms on a new collective bargaining agreement, it will finally drop, crushing the Tempo’s plans for a home opener on May 8 against the Washington Mystics at Coca-Cola Coliseum in downtown Toronto.

The league has circled March 10 as the drop-dead date by which a new CBA must be reached. 

Otherwise, the season itself will be affected.

The steady drip of Tempo momentum has already been stalled out alongside those talks. But any delays to the actual games would provide increasingly crushing blows.

Here’s where things stand with just over two months before the Tempo’s scheduled opener:

Indeed, they did. The Tempo have two pre-season games on April 29 against the Connecticut Sun — technically the franchise’s first-ever contest, set to be played at home — and May 1 against the Minnesota Lynx.

Then, the regular 44-game season begins one week later, when the Tempo are slated host the Mystics.

Other dates to circle are May 23, when the Tempo face their expansion-sibling Portland Fire for the first time, and July 20, when the champion Las Vegas Aces visit. Then there’s the Aug. 18 game, when Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark comes to Toronto for the first time.

All of that, of course, in theory.

In simple terms: money.

The WNBA signed an 11-year media rights agreement, set to kick in for this season, worth $2.2 billion US over the life of the deal. The sum reportedly represents six times what the league was making on its