Defense drives Washington Mystics to second place in WNBA standings
The Washington Mystics’ offense — led by one of the most versatile and talented scorers the WNBA has seen in Elena Delle Donne — is an irresistible topic. But there’s a lot more behind their 8-3 record.
Washington just finished one of those road trips where a team isn’t supposed to win all the games, because it’s too challenging. Yet that’s what the Mystics did: June 18 at Los Angeles, June 20 at Las Vegas, Sunday at Atlanta and Wednesday at Chicago.
The Mystics sit just behind the 9-3 Connecticut Sun in the WNBA standings. And in a case of perfect timing for WNBA fans, those two teams face off Saturday (ESPN, 2 p.m. ET) in Washington.
But if you ask the Mystics what their key has been, it wouldn’t be the fact that they have the league’s top-scoring offense (85.5 points per game). It would be that other thing that’s so important: defense.
“Offensively, we’ve always played that side of the floor at a high level,” Mystics guard Kristi Toliver said. “But we were so close to having a championship last year, and we knew as a group that we could have been better on the defensive end for the majority of the season.
“From the beginning of training camp this year, it was a point of emphasis. When you start to prioritize things about winning, defense is going to be at the top of the list. It’s a will, and it begins with the leadership on your team.”
That’s Delle Donne and Toliver, but also players such as LaToya Sanders and Natasha Cloud, both of whom are known for how tenaciously they defend. And even though she’s in just her second season, Ariel Atkins has set an example with how hard she plays defensively, too.
The Mystics are giving up 74.5 PPG, third-best in the league. Their offensive rating of 107.9 tops the league, and their defensive rating is fourth-best at 94.1. That gives them the WNBA’s top net rating at 13.8. And they are doing it without forward Emma Meesseman, who will help them a lot offensively and defensively. She’s currently playing with Belgium in the EuroBasket tournament that starts Thursday; she should return to Washington in early July.
Toliver points to the recent road trip as a perfect example of how committed the Mystics are to not letting fatigue be an excuse on defense.
They were on the road 11 days, and the final stop was a matinee Wednesday at Chicago, which also has been playing well. An 11 a.m. CT start at the end of a long road swing might spell a sloppy game for some teams, or at least a lack of defensive energy. But the Mystics talked to each other about avoiding that very thing.
“That’s the message we’re sending: ‘We can’t rest on defense,'” Toliver said. “We have to be locked in and have each other’s backs. Because especially when you’re doing all this traveling, everybody’s tired. That’s when you need each other the most.”
We saw that gritty, stick-together element come through last season for the Mystics when they made it to the WNBA Finals for the first time. Delle Donne was injured in the semifinal series against Atlanta, but she fought through it to keep playing. Washington ran out of gas in the Finals, and Seattle was so good last season, it would have been hard to envision anyone stopping the Storm.
But as Toliver said, the Mystics knew they weren’t that far away, and that they needed to be better defensively to have a legitimate shot at the title in 2019. It was facing Seattle again that underlined that point to Washington earlier this month.
On June 14 in Washington, the Mystics had a 13-point lead over the Storm in the fourth quarter, but Seattle rallied to win 74-71. You could tell how annoyed the Mystics were; this was a game that should not have gotten away from them. Coach Mike Thibault told them as much. That loss and one three days earlier at Connecticut were examples of how subpar defense cost the Mystics victories he thought they could have earned.
They took the message to heart, and then took it out on the Sparks. In Washington’s 81-52 victory in Los Angeles to start the four-game road trip, the Mystics held the Sparks to 28.8 percent shooting.
It was with the Sparks in 2016 that Toliver had her WNBA career highlight thus far, as Los Angeles won the league title. When she thinks about why the Mystics, the team she has been with since 2017, are playing the way they are, she gives a nod to the 2016 Sparks.
“We just have a good group of people, and I can compare it to that 2016 team,” Toliver said. “People that wanted to win and were willing to sacrifice to make that happen. This team has those same characteristics.
“Everybody is unselfish, works really hard, is dedicated to the task. It’s a really solid group. Not winning in the Finals last year — something like that either cracks you or brings you closer together. And with us, it’s brought us closer.”