At halftime, during the team’s May 30th win against the Indiana Fever, the Portland Fire were up by 13 points. That’s when a fan in the crowd turned to this Mercury reporter and asked, “It almost like the Fire’s just doing whatever they want—and it’s working. Is that on purpose?”
The short answer is yes… kind of. It’s not often that a WNBA coach makes their intentions as clear as the Fire’s Alex Sarama. Sarama, who is coaching in the W for the first time after previous stints in the NBA, the G League, and overseas, really wants the Fire to be disruptive.
The WNBA named Sarama as May’s “Coach of the Month,” a pretty hefty honor for a league newbie who hails from Guildford, England (for the curious, around 77,000 people live there and it’s part of Surrey). But it’s well earned: in the month of May, Sarama led the Portland Fire to a 6-4 record—which included three double-digit wins—and five of the team’s players more than doubled their scoring average.
Sarama is now the second WNBA coach to be named Coach of the Month during their first month of coaching since Becky Hammon snagged the honor in 2022—the same year she led the Las Vegas Aces to her first championship with the team.
Sarama and his coaching staff have accomplished this and other feats all while implementing his unique code of play, known as the Constraints-Led Approach (CLA). While it’s tempting to refer to CLA as Sarama’s system, he’s repeatedly insisted that CLA is more of a group project, and that the team’s players have just about as much input in how its principles are implemented as the coaches do.
*Insert record scratch*
Confused? That’s okay, you probably should be, and in this essay, I will attempt to break it all down in 1000 words or less.
By definition, CLA emphasizes putting athletes in control of making their own decisions. This might occur in practice, when the stakes are fairly low, but it’s also supposed to happen in games, when things are much more intense. Sarama’s CLA is based on evidence-based ideas that encourage players to adapt in the moment.
This requires a lot of creativity from the coaching staff, who must abandon their own ideas about how basketball should and should not be played before they can absorb something new. It also asks players to do the same, something that doesn’t always come easily.
Sarama has gone as far as to say he wants other teams to be “annoyed” that they have to play Portland—because they know the game will be 40 minutes of unrelenting basketball.
That was on display during the season’s early weeks, when the Fire lost two preseason games against the Seattle Storm and Los Angeles Sparks on April 29 and May 3, and then lost the team’s home opener against the Chicago Sky on May 9. But there was a shift on May 12, when Portland bested the New York Liberty 98-96.
Before you assume that playing creatively means playing entirely without structure, think again. As Sarama told reporters ahead of the team’s May 25 game against the New York Liberty in Brooklyn, randomness is exactly what he doesn’t want.
“I think there’s a perspective that [CLA] is just about letting the players kind of do whatever and make their own decisions,” he said. “It’s the complete opposite. It’s actually playing with a lot more structure, but it’s the structure which leads to moments of unstructured creativity.”
That can show up in different ways. Sometimes it means the Fire is deploying coverage defenses that trip their opponents up; other times, it means the other team seemingly loses track of who even has the ball—that is, until someone like Sarah Ashlee Barker or Bridget Carleton sinks a three-pointer they didn’t see coming. Pacing is key, and the Fire moves fast.
On top of all of that, Sarama wants the Fire to be a team of disruptors. In fact, he’s gone as far as to say he wants other teams to be “annoyed” that they have to play Portland—because they know the game will be 40 minutes of unrelenting basketball.
The season is short, but there are a lot of reasons to believe the Fire are well on their way to becoming the most annoying team in the league (in a good way)… if they can successfully navigate what’s already proving to be a difficult slate of games this month.
How CLA works—and what happens when things go wrong
The Fire’s incendiary 100-84 win over the Indiana Fever on May 30 was a big deal for a few reasons, and one of the biggest is that it showcased CLA in motion beautifully. The expansion team was faced with a home battle against arguably the most famous team in the league, something that could have left them rattled. Instead, they locked in.
The Fire dominated the Fever defensively on May 30, something Sarama said was part of the game plan. He also immediately gave credit where it’s due to his assistant coaches: Brittni Donaldson, Danielle Boiago, Sylvia Fowles, and Sefu Bernard. Donaldson, who also serves as the assistant general manager, was tasked with coming up with “out of the box ideas” to neutralize Caitlin Clark, and the Fire executed them all.
The team uses full court pressure (where they refuse to let up for the entire length of the court) to exhaust their opponents, something that worked well against the Fever, but they couldn’t replicate a few days later against the Golden State Valkyries—and they haven’t won a game since.
The Fire’s June 2 loss to the Valkyries was a tough one, especially so soon after the May 30 win. But there were lessons in that 95-77 game, as well as their 78-72 loss against the Phoenix Mercury on June 5… and their 89-72 loss against the Los Angeles Sparks on June 7.
Golden State put in a historic night of shooting: the team hit a record 18 three-pointers that the Fire couldn’t keep up with. That shooting was likely the cause of the Fire’s near total disappearance during the second quarter, something the team failed to recover from—or build upon.
There was still plenty of optimism as the team handed into a home match against the Mercury this past week. Barker started for the first time this season—a decision that was exciting, but also meant she was unable to provide her signature spark off the bench. The Fire’s shooting was solid, but their 22 turnovers handed the Mercury a messy win; the team turned around and gave up another 13 turnovers during the second half of the Los Angeles game alone.
Turnovers have been a consistent problem for the Fire all season. To a degree, that’s a consequence of the team’s system—dynamic, fast-paced basketball creates a lot of room for such an error. The Fire also have a secondary woe: the higher the turnovers, the lower the team morale.
As Barker put it while speaking to reporters about the team’s earlier season wins in Los Angeles, “In those moments, we really got to come together and stay who we are because in the games that we’ve won and the games that we’re successful, we’ve stayed together as a team.”
The Fire will likely be better prepared for these teams the next time they meet, but the rest of this month won’t be easy. The team hosts the Las Vegas Aces June 11 and the Dallas Wings June 13 before meeting the Minnesota Lynx in Minneapolis on June 15.