Portland Fire coaching hire: WNBA expansion team to hire Alex Sarama from Cleveland Cavaliers, per report

The Portland Fire are expected to hire Alex Sarama as the first coach in franchise history, according to Annie Costabile of Front Office Sports. The Portland Supporter first reported Tuesday that the Fire had inadvertently announced Sarama’s hiring on their LinkedIn page before it was swiftly deleted. 

Sarama is currently an assistant coach with the Cleveland Cavaliers, having previously served as the team’s director of player development. Prior to joining the Cavs, Sarama was an assistant coach and director of player development for the Rip City Remix, the Portland Trail Blazers’ G League affiliate. Sarama, who hails from England, also worked with Paris Basketball and the London Lions earlier in his career. 

Outside of his work with professional teams, Sarama founded Transforming Basketball in 2023 with a mission to “transform the basketball world by helping individuals and organizations make sense of an evidence-based approach.” Sarama is a leading proponent of Constraints-Led Approach, or CLA, a method of training that is taking the sports world by storm. 

Here is a quick explanation of CLA, via The Athletic’s Jared Weiss last month:

“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.”

With the Cavaliers, Sarama designed practices and individual development plans for players, and played a major role in the team’s leap from 48 wins in 2024 to 64 wins in 2025 with largely the same roster. The Fire will hope that Sarama, or “Professor Alex,” as he came to be known with the Cavaliers, can have the same impact in Portland as their journey as a franchise begins. 

This is not the first time that the Fire have had a mishap with a major announcement. In June, a month before their branding was officially announced, trademark applications for the “Portland Fire” and related logos were published by Sean Highkin of The Rose Garden Report. 

The Fire were officially introduced as the WNBA’s 15th team in September of 2024, and will begin play next season as part of the league’s expansion push. The first incarnation of the Fire lasted from 2000-02 before the team folded due to financial issues. 

“As a city that has long championed women’s sports, Portland is ready to reclaim its place in the WNBA and reignite its connection to the game on the world stage,” Clare Hamill, the team’s interim president, said in July. “We are thrilled to complete the journey of bringing professional women’s basketball back to the Rose City, while honoring the legacy of the original franchise to blaze a new, bold path forward.”

Prior to reportedly hiring Sarama, the Fire have been building out their front office. Inky Son, their first president, was suddenly fired in June, after just three months on the job. Hamill, a long-time Nike executive was hired as her replacement on an interim basis and remains in the role. In August, the team announced it had hired Vanja Černivec as their general manager. Černivec previously worked with the Golden State Valkyries as their vice president of basketball operations, and helped them have the best inaugural season by an expansion club in league history in 2025. On Tuesday, the Fire also announced the hiring of Ashley Battle as vice president of basketball operations, strategy and innovation. Battle played in the WNBA from 2005-2010 and most recently worked as a scout for the Boston Celtics and a television commentator for the Connecticut Sun.

The next step for the Fire will be their expansion draft, but it’s unclear when that will happen, or how it will work with the Toronto Tempo also entering the league next season. Expansion draft rules have to be collectively bargained, so the league cannot set a date until a new collective bargaining agreement is in place. If the expansion draft ends up being delayed due to the contentious labor battle between the WNBPA and the WNBA, that could actually benefit Hamill, Černivec and Sarama, who would have more time to prepare.