TORONTO — The last time the Chicago Sky and the Toronto Tempo shared a floor, Nyara Sabally scored 29 points and the Tempo walked out of Wintrust Arena with a 111-104 victory that felt, to everyone watching, like a statement from a franchise that was not supposed to be making statements yet. That was late May, on Chicago’s court. Sunday’s 3 p.m. ET tipoff at Coca-Cola Coliseum is something different: the first time in franchise history the Sky have come to Toronto, and the first time they will test whether what the Tempo built at home is real.
Chicago arrives carrying its first genuine momentum of the season. The Sky beat the Connecticut Sun 85-80 on Friday at Wintrust Arena — a win that ended a five-game losing streak and showcased something the team had not consistently demonstrated through its first two months: depth. Rookie Sydney Taylor came off the bench and scored a career-high 27 points, tying the league high for a reserve player this season and becoming the fastest player in Sky history to record her first 25-point game. Five Sky players finished in double figures. Thirty-one of their 36 made field goals were assisted. It was the kind of performance where the chemistry finally looked like something that could last.
What it cannot change, at least not yet, is the structural problem sitting behind all of Chicago’s box scores. Rickea Jackson tore her ACL before the season and will not play again in 2026. The Sky entered Sunday 4-6 overall, twelfth in a fifteen-team league, operating with a roster that has had to reinvent its identity around the absence of the player who was supposed to define it. Veteran guard Skylar Diggins-Smith, signed this offseason, has averaged 12.8 points and 5.4 assists in that role — capable, but not a replacement for what Jackson provided. DiJonai Carrington has yet to play. Courtney Vandersloot has yet to play.
Against that backdrop, the Toronto Tempo are not a soft landing. Sandy Brondello’s expansion franchise carries a 5-5 record and the fourth seed in the Eastern Conference, numbers that look unremarkable until you remember that no expansion team in WNBA history has had a .500 record through its first ten games. Brondello won a championship with the Phoenix Mercury in her first season as a head coach in 2014 and won again with the New York Liberty in 2024. She is, by any measure, the most decorated active coach in the league. Her assessment of what she has in Toronto is still being written, but the early chapters are better than anyone projected.
The offensive engine runs through Marina Mabrey and Brittney Sykes, the second-highest-scoring duo in the WNBA this season, combining for 38.1 points per game. Mabrey was taken in the expansion draft from the Connecticut Sun and has played with the authority of someone who does not regard this as a transitional posting. Sykes scored 24 points in the first Sky-Tempo meeting in May, while Mabrey added 20. When both are operating at that level simultaneously, Brondello’s team is harder to guard than its record indicates.
The case against the Tempo is not offense. Toronto is allowing 89.3 points per game, fourteenth in a fifteen-team league on the defensive end. That is the number that keeps this game competitive despite Toronto’s home advantage. Kamilla Cardoso, Chicago’s center, averages 14.8 points and 9.8 rebounds per game and could exploit a Tempo interior that has struggled to protect the paint. Diggins-Smith finished with 23 points and nine assists in the previous meeting — a loss, but not a passive one. If she plays at that level on Sunday and Taylor gives Chicago another jolt from the bench, the Sky have enough to win in a building they have never entered before.
Brondello has built the Tempo with veteran intelligence at the top and youth underneath. Rookie guard Kiki Rice, the team’s most versatile perimeter player, was injured late in Wednesday’s road loss to the New York Liberty — a Grade 2 ankle sprain — and her availability for Sunday remained unclear heading into game day. If Rice is limited or absent, Brondello will lean harder on Sabally, who already demonstrated against the Sky in May what she is capable of, and on Julie Allemand, the Belgian point guard taken from the Los Angeles Sparks in the expansion draft whose reads and pace suit Brondello’s system well.
Coca-Cola Coliseum has been a genuine factor for Toronto this season. The Tempo are playing home games in an arena that also houses the PWHL’s Toronto Sceptres, a hockey crowd converted to basketball, and the energy is different from what most visiting teams have experienced. Whether that converts on Sunday against a Sky team that has been here before — emotionally, if not geographically — is the question the game will answer.
What is not yet resolved about the Tempo is whether their offensive production is repeatable at the level Brondello needs it to be while the defense remains so porous. Five wins and five losses with the second-worst defensive rating in the league is a tightrope, and the Eastern Conference standings will not stay this forgiving into July. For the Sky, the question is whether Friday’s performance against Connecticut was a turning point or a single good night. The difference between those two things will not be answered by the standings. It will be answered by whether Chicago can protect the momentum it has, in a building it has never been in, against a coach who has won this league twice.
Tipoff is scheduled for 3 p.m. ET at Coca-Cola Coliseum in Toronto. The game will be broadcast on WCIU.
