The Washington Mystics are the WNBA title favorites and, through 10 games, they’re certainly playing like it.
Sometimes, it’s easy to overthink the basketball analysis.
Accordingly, here’s the idea: the 2019 WNBA season is Washington’s to lose.
This is not to say that the Mystics should assume it’s a sure thing they will win the WNBA title. The standings don’t even have them on top so far — Connecticut is 9-2, the Mystics are tied with the Sky one back in the loss column. The Aces, with Liz Cambage, are coming along quickly.
But the most straightforward way to think about their path to 2019 glory is this: they reached the WNBA Finals. The team that beat them, the Seattle Storm, is without Breanna Stewart, league and Finals MVP last season, and Sue Bird, point guard for the ages.
And there’s this, too: the Mystics are, pretty clearly, a better team than they were last season, in a variety of important ways.
Still, Mystics head coach Mike Thibault isn’t taking anything for granted, a reasonable stance for a coach who has won more WNBA games than anyone else, only missing that elusive WNBA title on his remarkable resume. So pretty early on in our interview when the Mystics came to New York recently, Thibault cautioned with a knowing smile: “A lot of things for us are too soon to tell.”
All of which is fair. The season is around a third over, which is significant, but that’s around 10 games, which is not necessarily indicative of what is to come. Still, take a look at the topline numbers. In 2018, the Mystics posted an offensive rating of 107.6, a defensive mark of 103.5. That’s a solid, positive territory number, good for the third-best net rating in the league.
In 2019? The offensive rating is up to 108.7, and critically, the defensive rating is down to 94.3. The net rating of 14.4 is significantly better than even Seattle’s league-leading difference of 9.2 last season, and it’s twice as large as any other team.
Then again, come playoff time, rosters will look different than they did at the moment, and for many teams, than they did early on this season. Many WNBA teams had players arrive late to training camp thanks to overseas commitments and lost players to the upcoming EuroBasket tournament.
This latter fact, though, obscures just how big a deal it is that the Mystics have Emma Meesseman in the fold this season. She missed all of 2018 with overseas commitments, but is off to a strong start in Washington this year, and will be returning after Belgium’s EuroBasket journey ends.
She played in three games for Washington, and shot 65.5 percent from the field, looking every bit like the All-Star she was prior to her time away from the Mystics.
Thibault said he played Meesseman in staggered minutes with franchise star Elena Delle Donne to get her comfortable on the court, but came away encouraged by her response to the minutes she had. As ever, with Meesseman, it’s about confidence, and so Thibault’s biggest takeaway wasn’t her play, but a conversation he had with her this preseason.
“She said to me, ‘Well, you went to the Finals without me’,” Thibault recalled. “I said, ‘We didn’t win.’ So that was kind of an exciting thing for her to think about, for sure, make a difference.”
There are other significant differences, too. Kristi Toliver provided her usual fireworks from beyond the arc and playmaking skills to the 2018 team, but then she got a chance to stay stateside in the offseason, rather than putting her body through endless play with an overseas contract. Instead, she coached with the Wizards, and the difference for her physical and even emotional state has been overwhelmingly positive.
There’s another element to this, though: Toliver, when she wasn’t coaching, got to work on things she wanted to add and expand to her game. She wasn’t at the mercy of whatever her overseas coaches demanded.
“It’s been a whole lot of fun,” Toliver said in a phone interview last month. “Because I really haven’t, in ten years, had that opportunity to really grow my game, physically and individually towards myself.”
Her teammate, and the person who helped convince her to come to D.C., says the difference is apparent.
“Yeah, she looks amazing and obviously it helps that she got to rest, but she also got to coach, so I feel like she’s even gained more of an IQ, when she already had a really high one,” Delle Donne said.
There are secondary contributors who help complete the Mike Thibault vision for this team as well. Ariel Atkins, who Delle Donne said is “even more confident and stronger”, continues to play critical minutes for the Mystics, taking on vital defensive assignments and sinking 3s, getting to the basket and finishing plays like a veteran. Natasha Cloud’s leap forward, revelatory last season, shows no signs of regression.
And Aerial Powers, who the Mystics acquired in a trade for Tayler Hill last season, is reminding everybody why she was once a fifth overall pick in the WNBA Draft after leaving Michigan State a year early.
“Yes, with she and Shatori Walker-Kimbrough then we have the depth we hope for,” Thibault said. “Obviously for a month now, we’re going to be a little thin, but when it counts we should have a full room of experienced players who know what it’s like.”
About Walker-Kimbrough: she scored 67 points in all of 2018. She’s got 82 already in 2019, reaching double-figures four times in her first ten games. For her part, Delle Donne said she blocks out the idea that after six seasons as one of the elite talents in the game, but never part of a team favored to win it all, this might be her time to hold up the trophy, something she watched Breanna Stewart and the Storm do on her sort-of home floor last fall. (Even that’s been improved: the Mystics have their own home, Entertainment and Sports Arena, so they won’t have to play musical chairs with venues come playoff time.)
“No, I just am happy with where our team’s been looking,” Delle Donne said. “It’s obviously early, but we’ve got to continue to improve, and I don’t really pay attention to any of that.”
As for Thibault, who could be forgiven a few fleeting thoughts about the last item on his WNBA to-do list, the horizon is less than a fortnight.
“I’m thinking about things we need to practice,” Thibault said. “If we’re playing a team [and] then we’re going to face the same kind of issues two games down the road, that’s in my mind. But most of the time I can’t tell you anything beyond the next ten days. And that’s just because I have to pack.”