How a Rock-Bottom Moment Propelled the Mystics to New Heights

Rock bottom arrived for the Washington Mystics with a soundtrack of venomous F-bombs and twang-inflected jeers. It was June 6 in College Park, Georgia, late in the third quarter of a dreadful pummeling at the hands of the Atlanta Dream — a game the visitors from D.C. would go on to lose by 32 points — when something within Mystics coach Sydney Johnson appeared to snap. His target: the referees.

By the time his profane, snarling, vein-popping diatribe was over — with no fewer than five Mystics staffers and a couple of players attempting but failing to pull him away from the refs — Johnson was being physically led off the court by police, while his horrified players looked on and a sellout crowd roared and waved bye-bye. Johnson was so heated, had it been a “Looney Tunes” cartoon, someone would have come along and fried an egg on the sizzling surface of his gleaming, bald head.

Perhaps, as Johnson claimed later, he had merely lost his cool at what he perceived to be a glaring imbalance in foul calls.

And perhaps what has followed since that ugly loss — the best sustained stretch of basketball of this Mystics season, if not several seasons — would have played out the same way even if Johnson and the Mystics had merely worn their humiliation quietly and turned the page to the next game.

But with the benefit of hindsight — and the evidence accumulated over the inspired, seven-game stretch the young Mystics have put together since, vaulting them into the WNBA’s playoff picture and altering both the trajectory of their season and, just maybe, the timeline for their arrival as a true contender — it is also possible to make another reading: Maybe Johnson’s diatribe may not have been as spontaneous as it seemed, and maybe the Mystics’ impressive surge in its wake has not been coincidental.

“It wasn’t just him losing his cool,” Mystics point guard Georgia Amoore said of Johnson’s meltdown in Atlanta. “I think he did that on purpose, to show us [the fight] we need to bring. … He’s a very, very smart man, and I think seeing that made us [take notice]. As a team, we knew that wasn’t us. It’s so easy when you’re getting beat, beat, beat to just be like, ‘Alright, we have no answers.’ But I think now we have some answers.”

“I don’t know if it was premeditated,” said guard Sonia Citron, the Mystics’ leading scorer and the WNBA’s Eastern Conference player of the week for June 15-21. “But I do think we took it as a sign that our coach has our backs. He’s willing to fight for us, run through a wall for us. So we want to do the same for him.”

Here, specifically, is what the Mystics have reeled off since getting bullied by Angel Reese and the Dream that fateful evening outside Atlanta:

• They came from 17 points down against the Indiana Fever to take a brief lead in the final seconds, only to be beaten, 78-76, on Caitlin Clark’s 30-footer at the buzzer.
• After squandering what had been an 18-point lead, they edged the visiting Toronto Tempo, 86-85, on Citron’s fadeaway buzzer-beater.
• They lost by 22 in Brooklyn against the superstar-laden New York Liberty, but then — with a solid, 88-81 road win against the Connecticut Sun sandwiched in between — exacted some revenge on the Liberty by returning to Barclays Center and pulling off an 86-83 upset.
• They went to Target Center in Minneapolis, a building in which they hadn’t won since 2022, and handed the top team in the WNBA standings this season, the Minnesota Lynx, an 84-79 loss on Sunday, giving Washington its first three-game road winning streak since 2024.
• Finally, Wednesday night in a rematch against the Lynx, they led at home for nearly the entire game before stumbling down the stretch in a 78-76 loss. More than one player remarked that the back-to-back, head-to-head matchups — not to mention the talent on both sides — gave the contests the feel of a playoff series.

The 4-3 stretch since the Atlanta debacle — more impressive than it looks, given the quality of opponents and the difficulty of winning on the road — leaves the Mystics with an 8-8 record and in a tie for eighth with Los Angeles in the league standings. Eight of the league’s 15 teams will make the playoffs. The Mystics, who finished a dismal 16-28 last season, haven’t been to the playoffs since 2023 and haven’t won a playoff series since their WNBA title run of 2019.

“We’re beating some of the best teams in the league,” said second-year forward Kiki Iriafen. “So [that means] more confidence for us, especially for the rookies. We’re past the quarter mark of the season. Everyone’s more confident and comfortable. We’re not playing out there scared, like a young team. I know we’re young, but we’re competitive, we’re fearless, we’re relentless.”

Second-year forward Kiki Iriafen said the Mystics are “more confident and comfortable” at this point in the season. Jeffrey Brown/Icon Sportswire/AP

The devastated facial expressions and body language on the part of the Mystics’ players and staff following Wednesday night’s loss to the Lynx — who have led the WNBA standings for nearly the entire season and whose roster has an average age nearly five years older than the Mystics’ — revealed everything about how far Washington had come this season.

“This is a game our team expected to win,” Johnson said. “Let that settle in. Minnesota beat us. I want to give them all the credit in the world. But that’s a shift.”

Being a casual observer of the Mystics is like being the aunt or uncle to a toddler: If you go a few weeks without seeing them, suddenly they’ve had a growth spurt and learned some essential, new skill and you’re blown away by how grown-up they seem.

Few outside observers would have expected the franchise to be at this point — in the mix for a playoff spot, while going toe-to-toe with some of the league’s elite teams on a nightly basis — so soon. Its roster, the second-youngest in league history, features a staggering eight rookies and three second-year players.

Even internally, were they being honest, the Mystics themselves might not have circled June 2026 as the point where they expected to make the leap from a painfully young but talented squad to a bona fide playoff contender whom nobody in the league wants to face.

And to be fair, it still isn’t entirely clear that is what’s happening. It is, after all, a long way until late September, when the regular season ends. But at the very least, the Mystics appear to be a better, more complete team than they were just three weeks ago.

“We’re not there yet, [but] it’s a mark of their ascension and their progress and their growth from the start of training camp to now,” Johnson said. “I’m not saying we’ve arrived. I want to make that clear. ... But I believe we’re gonna get there in the long run.”

In contrast to what the June 6 game at Atlanta looked and sounded like, a far different scene played out in Minneapolis following the Mystics’ season-defining win over the Lynx on Sunday. This one featured a soundtrack of unrestrained laughter and ecstatic, high-pitched screeching. Moments after the final buzzer, Johnson burst into the locker room and was midway through a bounding, whooping lap of high-fives with his players when Iriafen — a sturdy 6-foot-3 — suddenly grabbed her coach by the waist and lifted him a foot off the ground, leaving his feet dangling and the rest of the team in stitches.

If Atlanta represented rock bottom, this marked the high point of the Mystics’ season. Well, at least so far. If they stay on their current trajectory, there are certain to be higher points still to come — some of them perhaps existing well beyond even their own imaginations.