How the Washington Mystics climbed from 0-12 into playoff position

Before Friday, the last time the Mystics had played in the city was on June 11. They entered that game 0-12, which was the longest losing streak to start a season in franchise history and the fourth-longest in WNBA history. But they got their first win with a blowout of the Dream that night.

The Mystics returned to the Peach State this week in a much different position, but they needed a similar result. They’d won six of their last eight games, and their 72-69 win on Friday vaulted them into eighth place — in position to make the playoffs with three regular-season games left.

That would be uncharted territory: No team that started worse than 0-7 has ever made the WNBA playoffs. Even in the NBA, with a regular season that’s twice as long as the WNBA’s, only one team has ever started 0-12 and made the playoffs, back in 1996-97.

The Mystics are now tied with the Chicago Sky with 13-24 records, but the Mystics hold the tiebreaker after winning three of their four matchups this season. The Dream are a game behind at 12-25 and will face the Mystics again in Washington on Sunday. ESPN’s projections currently give the Mystics a 66% chance to get the eighth and final playoff spot, while Chicago has a 21% chance and Atlanta has a 13% chance.

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Though Mystics head coach Eric Thibault was fired up after Friday’s win, he wasn’t ready to discuss how far his team has come this season.

“I don’t know if I’m in [a] reflective mood yet. I don’t know about all that,” he told reporters postgame. “We got to play them again Sunday, and I think that’s all my mind’s on. … So I’m not going to go down that road.”

Thibault added that his players weren’t celebrating too much in the locker room because “everybody knows we can be better.” Their execution was far from perfect, especially in areas the coaches had emphasized before the game. They’d talked about keeping Atlanta off the free-throw line, but the Dream shot 25 free throws. They’d discussed boxing out when shots went up, but Atlanta got 17 offensive rebounds and 14 second-chance points.

The Mystics won anyway because of their stifling defense. They held Atlanta to 28.8% shooting from the field and 25.0% from 3-point range, and they forced 16 turnovers that they converted into 15 points. The second quarter was Washington’s masterpiece: Atlanta shot just 5.3% from the field (1-for-19) with five turnovers, and its only field goal came on a banked 3-pointer with 1:31 left.

“When we struggled, it was because we allowed them to get hands on the ball,” Dream head coach Tanisha Wright told reporters postgame. “So it slowed a lot of the things that we were doing down. … Now the next pass isn’t sharp, the next action isn’t crisp. And they did a lot of that, I think, in the second quarter. That really affected us getting into stuff.”

Mystics guard Brittney Sykes, who was drafted by the Dream in 2017, particularly seems to like playing in Atlanta. In June, she scored 18 points in under 15 minutes before a foot injury ended her night, and on Friday, she had 20 points on 7-for-13 shooting in nearly 26 minutes. She made all three of her 3-pointers and added three rebounds, two assists, two steals and a block.

“Something about Atlanta, I guess. She tends to go off,” center Stefanie Dolson told reporters postgame with a chuckle.

“I always have a fun time coming back to Atlanta,” Sykes said a few minutes later. “I think it’s just one of those things where we know where we are in the season and … it just happened to be Atlanta that we’re playing, so [I wanted] just to go out, just be aggressive.”

Sykes got on the board with a driving layup less than three minutes into the game. She dribbled the ball on the perimeter near the corner, and just when it looked like her line to the rim was cut off, she doubled back and reattacked. Throughout the first half, she drove by multiple defenders and finished over and around Atlanta’s length.

Sykes capped her half with an open 3-pointer off an inbounds play, and she hit two more in the third quarter. Thibault said it was no coincidence that those third-quarter threes came right after Sykes turned down an open one: “She knows she should have shot the other one.”

“I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with her when she’s making jump shots,” he added.

With the Mystics up by three with under 20 seconds to play, Sykes again came through for the Mystics — but not with her scoring. The 5’9 guard jumped with 6’2 Dream forward Naz Hillmon to tie up the rebound of a missed Atlanta shot with 6.3 seconds left. Sykes then battled for the jump ball and it bounced around, preventing Atlanta from getting another shot.

The ball ended up in Sykes’ hands as time expired, and she chucked it straight up toward the ceiling, like players sometimes do when they win a championship.

“For a really young team, we took their runs [and] we responded,” Thibault said. “We just found a way to grind it out. And I think that more than playing great basketball and cruising to a win, sometimes those are more important to a team as it’s developing.”

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The Mystics have now won seven games in 22 days after needing 58 days to win their first six. On Aug. 22, the Mystics sat in a three-way tie for last place at 6-22, 5.5 games behind the Sky for eighth place and 4.5 behind the Dream.

However, since then, the Mystics have the second-highest winning percentage in the league, and they’ve made up 5.5 games on both the Sky and the Dream.

“We had ample opportunity to … point fingers or to lose some belief, to go our own separate ways. And we didn’t do that, to the credit of everybody in that locker room,” Thibault said on Sept. 3. “And you kind of got to have faith that you’ll get results before you start getting results.”

The Mystics’ turnaround isn’t a case of a team simply riding its hot shooting. The Mystics’ effective field goal percentage — a statistic that accounts for the added value of 3-pointers — has increased slightly, from 50.0% in their first 28 games to 52.7% over their last nine. But overall, they’re scoring about the same number of points per game.

The bigger change has been their defense, which they’ve honed during the Olympic break and in late-season practices. Opponents have scored just 75.6 points per game against the Mystics in the past nine games, compared with 84.2 over the first 28. And opponents’ effective field goal percentage has dropped from 52.1% earlier in the season to 44.3% in the past nine games. The latter is the best in the WNBA over that span.

The Mystics’ defense has cut down on fouling and limited opponents’ free-throw attempts over the past nine games, and it has forced turnovers at a slightly higher rate. The help rotations have been there for the Mystics, and their blocks per game have jumped from 3.0 to 5.1.

Some of those adjustments have generated easy offense for the Mystics, as they’ve increased their fast-break points from 7.1 to 11.3 per game. But even when they don’t score right away, the defensive stops give the Mystics momentum and a foundation for good offense.

While it certainly helps to have players like Sykes and wing Karlie Samuelson back from injury, these improvements have come at a time when the Mystics might have been expected to get worse, not better, defensively. Since Aug. 20, when the Mystics dealt veteran forward Myisha Hines-Allen at the trade deadline and committed to giving more minutes to younger players, Thibault has rotated 10 or 11 players per night. That level of substituting, along with the many new lineups Thibault has tried in that span, could’ve hurt the players’ connectedness and execution on defense.

Instead, the Mystics have gotten better, even with one of their best defenders, center/forward Shakira Austin, missing most of the season with hip and ankle injuries.

“To play as many players as we are, you got to have trust that everybody is locked into schemes and knows their jobs and knows priorities in a scout,” Thibault said on Friday. “If you have eight that are locked in and two that aren’t, it’s going to show up really quick. So it’s a credit to everybody when we have practices and shootarounds and walkthroughs and film that we’ve got a real intent about our preparation across the board.”

The Mystics’ defensive improvements have also translated in “clutch time,” which WNBA Stats defines as when games are within five points in the final five minutes. The Mystics played clutch minutes in 20 games through Aug. 22, but they only won three of them.

In contrast, the Mystics have played clutch minutes in five of their last nine games — and won four of them.

The Mystics’ effective field goal percentage in clutch time is essentially unchanged from earlier in the season. But their opponents’ effective field goal percentage in clutch minutes has dropped from 53.0% earlier in the season to 36.7% lately.

Put another way, through the Mystics’ first 28 games, they were allowing opponents to shoot about the same in clutch moments as they were at other times. Over the past nine games, though, opponents have shot much worse in clutch moments than at other times.

Another key component of the Mystics’ recent success has been their bench. The reserves have been steady all season, leading the WNBA in bench points per game. As Wright said pregame, “If you think that you’re going to get any reprieve when they come in, you’re sadly mistaking yourselves.”

But the Mystics’ bench has stepped up further over the past nine games, taking advantage of added minutes and more open rotations.

On Friday, 22-year-old forward Sika Koné led the reserves with nine points and eight rebounds. Veteran guard Shatori Walker-Kimbrough, who leads the league in total points by a reserve this season, had seven points on 3-for-4 shooting. Another seven points came from 22-year-old guard Jade Melbourne. She is the WNBA’s youngest player, yet she ranks seventh among reserves in total points.

For Dolson, what separates the Mystics’ reserves from others she’s played with in her 11-year career is their confidence and decisiveness. Some bench players, she said, aren’t sure what to do and are afraid to mess up when they get in games. But on the Mystics, everyone knows and executes their role.

When the Mystics decided to rotate players more freely after the trade deadline, it was with an eye toward developing young players for the future, not making an improbable run at the playoffs. But the young players have seized their moments and showed areas of growth, and it’s led to results like Friday’s win.

“It’s been pretty dope to just watch the young ones figure it out through this entire season,” Sykes said. “It’s just one of those things where you want to give them everything, but it’s just another thing to just let them figure it out, just be there for tidbits. And seeing that second group just go out there and find their chemistry and find their rhythm, it’s been really, really amazing to watch, and it has helped us in a lot of games.”

“It feels great as a team when everybody’s chipping in and contributing and celebrating each other,” Thibault added. “And we’ve been in that mode for a while, and we’re just gonna stay in it.”

In less than a week, we’ll know how far that mode can take the Mystics — and whether the team that was once 0-12 will suddenly be playoff bound.

The Next’s Wilton Jackson contributed reporting for this story. Unless otherwise hyperlinked, all data on the Mystics’ turnaround is from WNBA Stats.