Toronto’s fourth-quarter trouble has become a pattern, not a blip. The Toronto Tempo have lost seven straight fourth quarters since June 22, and those final periods have gone against them by 60 points heading into Friday night’s game with the Atlanta Dream.
That matters now because the next stop comes at 7:30 p.m. ET on ION, and Toronto no longer has room to treat late-game lapses as a small sample. The Tempo are 2-5 over that stretch, and the latest numbers underline why close games have started to tilt away from them before the final horn.
Dan Falkenheim’s midseason efficiency calculations for all 15 WNBA teams show the shape of the problem. Toronto ranks ninth in halfcourt offense at 0.91 points per play, while its best work comes in chaos: first in transition offense at 1.19 points per play and third in scramble offense at 1.21. But those two strengths make up only 22 percent of Toronto’s offensive situations, which means most possessions still come down to the kind of slower, more structured basketball where the Tempo have not been nearly as effective.
The same split shows up on the other end. Toronto has a positive net rating in the first quarter and a negative net rating in every other quarter, a sign that early pace has not carried into the later stages of games. Its defensive rating is 112.0, which ranks 13th, and the numbers get harsher when possessions slow down: Toronto allows 1.01 points per possession in transition, 1.14 in scramble situations, and 0.95 in the halfcourt, which ranks last. That is the part of the game that usually decides fourth quarters.
Marina Mabrey is part of that picture because Toronto’s late-game issues are not only about missing shots; they are about how the Tempo are forced to play when the floor shrinks. In transition and scramble situations, they can move before a defense is fully set. In a fourth quarter, when possessions settle into halfcourt work, the same pace that fuels Toronto early can leave it exposed late.
The unresolved question is not whether Toronto can run. It is whether the Tempo can make their fastest strengths matter after the game slows down. Friday night offers the next test, and it comes against the Atlanta Dream, the team Toronto last beat in a fourth quarter on June 22 by nine points even though Atlanta still won the game. Since then, the fourth-quarter gap has only widened. If Toronto wants to change the script, it has to do it in the one part of the game that has kept beating it back.
