Apparently, building an expansion team isn’t as hard as it used to be. After the success of Golden State in 2025, when the Valkyries became the first expansion team to qualify for the playoffs, the Portland Fire and Toronto Tempo are both in position to repeat the feat, albeit less than one month into the season.The Tempo signaled their intentions to be competitive in their debut campaign early: They hired two-time WNBA champion Sandy Brondello as their head coach and added an All-Star veteran Brittney Sykes in free agency. Even their nominal WNBA rookies Maria Conde and Laura Juškaitė are 29 and 28 years old, respectively. Still, Toronto sitting second in offensive rating entering Sunday’s games is an impressive feat for a first-year squad.The bigger surprise has been Portland. The Fire had a number of hiccups in their return to the WNBA. The initial prospective ownership group dropped out, their franchise’s president was fired three months into the job, and their head coach’s hiring was leaked prematurely on LinkedIn. Their first-round pick Iyana Martín was a draft-and-stash, and their first pick in the expansion draft, Bridget Carleton, had a career average of 5.7 points per game. But much like Golden State a year ago, Portland’s players have been empowered in their bigger roles, and they’re riding a great homecourt advantage to a 6-4 record. The Fire’s latest blowout win over Indiana resembled the Valkyries’ nationally-televised demolition of Las Vegas in their eighth game last season.The potential of expansion to dilute the best teams in the WNBA — the Aces of 2025 were clearly not as deep or dominant as the championship squad of 2023 — remains, but the success of Golden State, Toronto and Portland has highlighted the pool of quality players who can perform in the regular season. Whether this phenomenon continues with Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia is an open question, but there seems to be a real value in getting to start from scratch; the energy and freshness seems to have overcome the challenge of the newness.The matchup between the Fire and Valkyries this week will be a fun test of Portland’s expansion success. Regardless of the result, both teams are comfortably in the top half of this week’s power rankings.RankTeamPrevious rank1Minnesota82Atlanta23Las14Dallas105Golden State96Portland137New York 48Indiana79Toronto1110Los Angeles1411Chicago312Phoenix513Washington614Seattle1215Connecticut15Two teams trending upMinnesota LynxIt remains mind-boggling that a team missing Napheesa Collier (and Carleton, and Jess Shepard, and Alanna Smith, and Natisha Hiedeman …) is sitting atop the WNBA standings. For all of the deserved love coming Olivia Miles and Natasha Howard’s way for their pick-and-roll partnership, the Lynx offense ranks eighth in the WNBA — exactly in the middle. Their league-leading defense (96.8 points allowed per 100 possessions) is the separating factor.Coach Cheryl Reeve has been cooking up elite defenses for more than a decade, and this season’s squad already has its principles intact, despite an offensive surge around the league. What’s interesting about Minnesota’s defense is it isn’t fueled by turnovers or a low foul rate — the Lynx just force a lot of misses. Opponents are shooting 38.4 percent from the field and 27 percent on 3s. Minnesota is long and quick and rotates on a string, just as it did last season with drastically different personnel.