WNBA expansion reimagined: Inside the bold minds building the Portland Fire

"We've all seen rosters that have been stacked with players and have not achieved much, and then we've seen rosters (where) everybody is kind of downplaying them, then they outperform. 'How do we get there?' That's kind of my vision for the team."

Two months after being hired, Černivec tapped Alex Sarama to be the Fire's head coach. Sarama was an assistant coach and director of player development for the Cleveland Cavaliers. Before that, the Guildford, England, native held coaching and player development roles with the London Lions, Paris Basketball, Rip City Remix and NBA EMEA.

Sarama, who leans into innovation, is the founder of Transforming Basketball, a global movement reshaping how coaches teach and players learn. The Portland coach authored a book of the same name, recognized as a quintessential modern coaching guide. At 30 years old, Sarama is younger than some of the players that joined the roster during Portland's expansion draft.

"It was the first question I asked him. I was like, 'How old are you?'" forward Emily Englester said during Fire training camp. "'You just look so young.' He said, 'Thirty'. I was like, 'Dang. Karlie (Samuelson is) older than him.

"He's really an intelligent man. He's really good at what he does. It's funny. Everything that he has put out for us to learn is the kind of basketball that I like to play, and I think that's one of the reasons he brought me here."

Sarama hit the ground running when he arrived in Portland. He told USA TODAY Sports he built organizational systems for everything from engaging scouting reports that were quiz-based to how the team would approach practices and a day-to-day schedule before the players arrived.

Samara waited to do anything else until his roster was in place. Defending the pick-and-roll, or any other play, had to be tailored to the players if the Fire were going to have any success. He studied film of every player Portland selected.

Once players arrived, Sarama instituted KPIs (key performance indicators) which will be tracked after every game and month of the season. The Fire coach wants his team to play structurally sound, with an up-tempo pace and disruptive defense, creating a recognizable brand of basketball. Sarama wants Portland to become a destination where players want to come to get better.

With the foundation Sarama, Černivec, and the Fire's staff have laid, they hope to reach the playoffs sooner than later and produce some of the league's biggest stars. That kind of focus and attention to detail may seem to exude pressure to have immediate success. But Sarama says he isn't felling it.

Head coach Alex Sarama of the Portland Fire talks with Megan Gustafson.

"It's more (that) we're focused on doing the best job we can every single day to put the players in the best position possible," Sarama told USA TODAY Sports. "... We can't let people on the outside or anything like that affect us. We know what we've got here is a really special thing. "This is a long-term project. Where can we be by Year 2, Year 3, Year 4, to put the Portland Fire in the best place possible? So that's what this is about."

Sarama and Černivec's approach is unlike anything their players have seen. Center Megan Gustafson said during Fire training camp that their differential learning approach was "refreshing." After eight years in the WNBA, Gustafson said Černivec and Sarama had made basketball fun again.

Second-year player Sarah Ashlee Barker praised Sarama's use of a constraint-led approach (CLA). The learning method uses psychology and neuroscience research to replace training, where athletes learn a single movement pattern step-by-step with game-like reps that institute unique rules. The CLA forces an athlete to adapt typically moves with real-time improvisation.

"We don't do a single drill that's not important or doesn't mimic a game or a rep that does not mimic a game," Sarah Ashlee Barker said. "Even in the shooting, all that kind of stuff, if you look around, our positioning, how we shoot ... everything is so catered to game-like reps.

"It's not just come in and just kind of shoot freely and stuff like that. It's like, 'Hey. This is the importance of it. This is what we're trying to do.' Everyone's bought in."

The buy-in has already paid off. Portland played in front of a crowd of 19,335 at the Moda Center in its debut on May 9, the second-largest crowd for a home-opener in WNBA history. The Fire lost the matchup, 98-93, to the Chicago Sky, but three days later, it would introduce itself to the league with a Sarama-described "firm handshake."

On May 12, the Fire delivered a theatrical 98-96 finish over an experienced New York Liberty team to get their first victory. With just seconds remaining, Barker gathered a heads-up rebound and tossed the ball into the air as she was falling to the ground. The shot went up, hit the backboard, then hit the front of the rim ― and the back of the rim in dramatic fashion ― before bouncing in.

The sequence was also a testament to everything Černivec and Sarama had been building for the last eight months. Sarama lauded his players postgame, saying they executed the game plan perfectly. Sarama revealed the Fire deployed a unique defense to pull off a win against one of the best teams in the league.

"I would love for this to kind of become the Silicon Valley of professional sports," Sarama told USA TODAY. "We've hired people here who have a background in skill acquisition and who are committed to constraint-set approach, an evidence-based approach, but it starts with, we have to have the attitude where we embrace the fact that we don't know everything, and we have to be continuously open to learning. Even (on May 5), at practice, we had an engineer (from) NASA there. It's like we're bringing all these incredible guests to learn from.

"I really want us to kind of rip up the playbook of how things have always been done, just constantly ask the deep questions. Are we doing this because it's always been done this way? Or is there a better way we can do it?"

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: WNBA expansion: Meet the bold minds building the Portland Fire