At the end of an unremarkable Washington Mystics shootaround, on the first of six game days in a span of a week and a half, near the end of the fourth month of a grueling, five-month season, Georgia Amoore took it upon herself to break the morning monotony. Upon nailing her heave in the team’s daily half-court shooting contest, the Mystics’ rookie point guard ripped off her practice jersey, waved it over her head and sprinted away in her sports bra, Brandi Chastain-style, leaving her teammates doubled over in laughter.
It was classic Amoore: boundless energy, pure fun, unadulterated spirit. Pro basketball is hard, as the 25-year-old Australia native would be the first to tell you. But that doesn’t mean it has to be joyless.
In the midst of a special season for the Mystics, as the youngest team in the WNBA closes in on a playoff berth, Amoore’s struggles on the court have stood out like 6-foot-7 center Lauren Betts in a room full of second-graders.
With that in mind, of all the developments for the Mystics in Wednesday night’s 93-82 home win over the injury-depleted Toronto Tempo, the biggest was arguably Amoore’s productive night: nine points on 3-of-6 shooting, plus three assists. It may not look like much, but those nine points tripled her production over the previous five games, in which her point totals, respectively, were zero, zero, zero, three and zero.
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“Yes, we need her to make threes. We need her to guard her matchup. We need her to find [open] people,” Mystics coach Sydney Johnson said of Amoore. “Those are all the stats and performance part. And that’s critical, because it’s the pros. But what she gives to us, whether that [performance] is on or off, is connectivity. And that’s why she’s such a key player for us. She’s a key part of what we’ve got going this year. We wouldn’t be here without her.”
Since falling to .500 in mid-July, the Mystics have now won nine of their past 11 games, the only blemishes a pair of road losses at defending champion Las Vegas. And with Saturday’s win against Los Angeles, the Mystics have the distinction of beating every team in the league at least once.
With just nine regular-season games remaining (seven of them against teams from the bottom half of the standings), the Mystics, among the most pleasant surprises of this WNBA season, control their own playoff destiny. In seventh place at 21-14, and six games clear of ninth-place Portland, they are closer (two games) to a berth in the top four, which would guarantee home-court advantage in the best-of-three first round, than they are to falling clear out of the playoff picture.
Plenty of observers expected the Mystics to deal for a veteran point guard at the trade deadline earlier this month, given the lack of production from Amoore and backup Alicia Florez. But rather than give up a piece of its future for a boost to its present, the franchise stayed true to its mission of building a consistent contender through drafting and player development — even if it meant the Mystics might be a piece or two shy of true title contention in 2026.
Their only move was a low-risk waiver claim on 32-year-old wing Betnijah Laney-Hamilton, late of the New York Liberty, who automatically became the oldest player on the Mystics’ roster by a whopping eight years — as well as the only player on the team with a WNBA championship ring, earned with New York in 2024. (She also juiced the roster’s average age to the point where they are no longer the second-youngest team in WNBA history, but merely the 10th-youngest.)
While the Mystics’ failure to import a new point guard could have been interpreted as a vote of confidence in Amoore, it was shortly after the trade deadline that her performance bottomed out, as she went a combined 1-for-17 from the floor during the stretch of five games in which she scored a total of just three points. In the last of those five games, at home against Los Angeles on Saturday, she played a season-low 11 minutes and was again on the bench in the latter moments of the game.
But the Mystics have been unyielding in backing Amoore publicly, taking pains to point out all the things she does that don’t show up on the stats sheet — shouting it louder the more she struggled on the court. This week, Johnson singled her out when asked to name his most underrated player.
“She is really key in terms of executing what we want to do offensively and defensively,” Johnson said Wednesday. “And yeah, her playing time is going to fluctuate, because there are other players out there helping us as well. [But] her ability to keep us connected and keep us true to the scouting report, essentially operating as a coach on the floor, has been off the charts. Off the charts.”
There’s little doubt the Mystics are at their best when Amoore is at hers. It’s no coincidence some of her best performances have come in some of the Mystics’ most impressive wins: 10 points and eight assists in a road win against New York in June, eight and seven in another road win at Minnesota two days later; nine and eight in a win at Golden State in July; 12 and five in a home win against Dallas two weeks ago.
But in recent weeks, as Amoore’s slump deepened, the Mystics have frequently kept her on the bench in crunch time, with Sonia Citron, a wing by trade, shifting into the point guard role — despite her own reservations over it. It happened again Wednesday night, with Amoore and Florez both on the bench and Citron shifting to point guard whenever the Tempo made a run that threatened the Mystics’ lead.
“We’re tremendously different” when Amoore is on her game, Citron said. “She has such a big impact, and it goes way beyond whether she’s making shots or not, or the number of points she has. She’s a great leader. She’s a great captain. She gets us into our offense. … For me, I just feel a lot more at peace and calm when she’s on the floor, knowing she’s going to get our team in shape and get us where we need to go.”
Amoore, Citron said, “sees things other people don’t see, whether that’s calling for something — telling the post, ‘Go screen down for Sonia’ — that’s not really a play. That’s just something she sees. And that’s something I don’t do. When I run the offense, I call a play, and that’s what it is. Whereas she reads the game — a point guard mentality.”
Amoore, a first-round draft pick (sixth overall) out of Kentucky in 2025, tore her ACL three practices into her Mystics career and missed the entire season, meaning she is technically still a WNBA rookie. Now 15 months out from surgery, she acknowledges she is still building back strength and resilience in the joint.
“My knee, it’s stable. But I’m going through the ups and downs of building that tolerance back up again, trusting it again,” she said. “Obviously there’ve been some bumps and bruises along the way. It’s not a perfect process.”
In the meantime, she said, she makes an effort to pay attention to the things that don’t require perfect physical condition: body language, energy level, communication.
“That’s a super undervalued part of the game,” Amoore said. “Sometimes it’s not real rewarding, but it’s needed. Obviously, I would love to have some [positive] stats to back that up. But … my body is getting used to the season again. If I was always super negative about how I’m feeling physically, which a lot of people fall into that trap, I wouldn’t be much fun to be around. I’ve always been positive, always brought energy. And my performance is never going to affect that.”
There is no metric for measuring a player’s psychic contribution to a team’s mood, but if there were, Amoore’s value would be at an All-Star level. Whenever and wherever the Mystics are clowning around, which is basically always and anywhere, she is typically at the center of it, the full-sprinting, jersey-waving ringleader of this circus.
In the absence of compelling statistical evidence, that psychic value may not be enough to keep Amoore on the floor late in close games, and it may not be enough to keep the Mystics from prioritizing a point guard this offseason.
But it will keep Amoore around for a while. And when Amoore is around, running the offense, dishing out assists, turning random late-season shootarounds into slapstick comedy, the Mystics are a little bit better and a whole lot happier.
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