Julie Allemand Doesn't Get Enough Credit. That's About to Change.

The Player Nobody Sees Coming

There is a specific type of basketball player who is invisible to casual fans and irreplaceable to coaches. They don't top the scoring column. They don't make the highlight reel. They don't get the endorsement deals.

What they do is make every player around them look better than they actually are — and then disappear into the stat sheet while everyone else gets the credit.

Julie Allemand is that player. She is the most important person on the Toronto Tempo roster. And if the season goes the way it should, most people won't fully realise it until she's not on the floor.

What the Numbers Actually Say

The counting stats on Allemand are deceptively modest. Five assists per game. Four rebounds. Some threes. A steal here and there.

That's the surface. Here is what's underneath:

• •� She averaged 5.0 APG in 2025 — elite playmaking at the professional level, not just for a guard but for any player on the court
• •� She is a career 36% three-point shooter — not a liability from deep, a genuine threat who forces defenders off her and opens driving lanes
• •� She recorded a triple-double in 2025 — 10 points, 11 rebounds, 11 assists — and did it with the quiet matter-of-factness of someone who was just doing their job
• •� She was the first pick in the entire expansion draft — not the second pick, not a committee decision. First. Pick. The Tempo brain trust looked at every available player in the WNBA and decided the most important piece to build around was Julie Allemand

That last point does not get said enough. When Leah Wright Rogers and the front office built this roster, they started with the conductor. Everything else was designed around her ability to run it.

The Art of the Floor General

Allemand doesn't play basketball the way scorers do. She doesn't count her own shots. She counts everyone else's.

The best description I've heard of her game is this: she sees the play three possessions before it happens. By the time the ball is in her hands, she already knows where it's going — and so does the player receiving it, because Allemand has spent the previous 30 seconds of the shot clock positioning them perfectly to receive it.

This is the rarest skill in basketball. It cannot be taught. It cannot be developed in a gym. It is either there or it isn't — and in Allemand, it is very much there.

The Belgian National Team doesn't make her a decade-long captain because of her scoring average. They make her captain because when she's on the floor, the team is smarter.

The Mabrey Factor

Here is where the Tempo's backcourt goes from excellent to potentially historic.

Marina Mabrey is a high-volume, high-emotion scorer. She plays with the controlled chaos of someone who trusts her instincts completely and expects the ball to be where she needs it to be. That kind of player is only as dangerous as the point guard who can anticipate where "where she needs it to be" actually is.

Allemand and Mabrey are not just teammates. They are genuine friends — the kind of friends who text each other after games, who have been on each other's TikTok accounts, who have spent enough time together that the "I know exactly where you're going" quality of their connection is not something they have to build in training camp.

It is already built. It was built in Los Angeles and on social media and in whatever group chat they share. Toronto is simply the place where it finally gets to play out over 44 games in front of a city that is hungry for exactly this.

When Mabrey curls off a screen, Allemand already has the pass loaded. Not because she's fast. Because she already knew Mabrey was going to curl.

The Tempo in Toronto Tempo

The franchise name is not a coincidence. Tempo — pace, rhythm, timing — is exactly what Allemand controls.

She decides when the offence runs. She decides when it slows. She decides whether a possession ends with a Mabrey pull-up, a Sabally post touch, or a Sykes slash to the rim. Every player on this roster is a weapon. Allemand is the hand that aims them.

In the modern WNBA — a league increasingly defined by pace, switching defence, and backcourt creation — a point guard who can control all of that without demanding the ball for herself is worth more than any individual scorer.

Sandy Brondello knows this. That's why the first call she made was about the Belgian General.

The Tea

The city is going to fall in love with Marina Mabrey. Her personality is too big, her game too electric, for it to happen any other way. That's right and correct and exactly what a franchise player should be.

But the Tempo fans who really understand basketball — who stay past the final buzzer and rewatch the tape — are going to fall in love with Julie Allemand.

She is the calm inside the storm. The Belgian metronome. The reason the whole thing works.

Watch her hands. Watch her eyes. Watch where the ball goes a second before everyone else in the building knows it's going there.

That's the most underrated show in the WNBA. And it's playing at Coca-Cola Coliseum starting May 16.