The Portland Fire begin play in 2026, becoming the 15th WNBA franchise as the league continues its rapid expansion. On Friday morning, the franchise named the first head coach of this iteration of the Fire: Cleveland Cavaliers assistant Alex Sarama.

Sarama brings a very unique background to the WNBA. An English-born coach, he made his way through the world of European basketball, working in basketball operations for NBA Europe before moving into assistant coaching roles in Belgium, Italy and France. In 2023, he joined the staff of the London Lions as director of methodology, working under Vanja Černivec, who is now Portland's general manager.

Sarama made his way to the U.S., serving as director of player development for the Rip City Remix—the Trail Blazers' G-League affiliate—in 2023–24 before taking the same position with the NBA's Cavaliers. He had been promoted to assistant coach before leaving Cleveland for the Fire job.

Sarama is an advocate of the philosophy of "Constraints-Led Approach" (CLA) training, on which he wrote the book Transforming Basketball. The philosophy has drawn in numerous high-level believers across sports, including the Spurs' Victor Wembanyama, Sparks' Kelsey Plum and Sarama's now-former boss, Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson.

From The Athletic:

"The CLA, which stands for Constraints-Led Approach, is a learning method that has made its way from academia to the mainstream, drawing from innovative research in psychology and neuroscience. It replaces traditional block training, where an athlete learns a single movement pattern step-by-step, with game-like situations that feature special rules, forcing them to adapt their moves on the fly. It’s founded on the principle that training perfectly yields imperfect results. ...

"The CLA takes the ground-up approach of block training, which eliminates the infinite variables that affect athletes in the heat of competition, and flips it on its head.

"That means putting players into scenarios with different limitations called 'constraints' to simulate the unpredictable environment of an actual game. Whether it’s the number of steps they can take, the area of the playing surface from which they are allowed to maneuver or even the weight of the ball they are using, players are repeatedly told to overcome restrictions to accomplish a task. While painstakingly working through mistakes, they are forced to find advantageous opportunities, 'affordances' in CLA parlance."

Sarama plans to put CLA at the center of building the Portland franchise.

“The opportunity to build something from the ground up is unique,” Sarama said in the Fire press release. “At the Fire, we’re not just creating a team—we’re redefining how the game is taught and played, through an approach centered around adaptability and supported by evidence-informed methodologies. We want to create a new standard for the game.”

More WNBA on Sports Illustrated


This article was originally published on www.si.com as WNBA's Portland Expansion Team Hires Cavaliers Assistant As First Coach.

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