She saw the guy heading her way and knew what was coming next, with the sort of sixth sense a star athlete develops when they’re out in public and can feel all the eyeballs pointed at them. Sonia Citron, at the time an all-conference guard at Notre Dame, was at a restaurant with friends in South Bend, Indiana. She was still mulling how best to respond to an unwanted request for an autograph and a photo when he arrived at their table.
“Excuse me,” the man said. “Are you Caitlin Clark?”
Citron, now a second-year pro and two-time All-Star for the Washington Mystics, chuckles at the memory. It was neither the first nor the last time someone had noted her resemblance — same dark hair, same dark eyes, same build, same No. 22 jersey, even the same middle name (Elizabeth) — to Clark, the former Iowa Hawkeyes and now Indiana Fever superstar.
But these days, at least around the WNBA, it is Citron’s court vision, efficiency and playmaking ability, more than her physical appearance, that are drawing comparisons to Clark and some of the other top guards in the league. And as the season careens towards the All-Star break, she is the number one reason the Mystics, despite carrying the second-youngest roster in the history of the league, are hanging onto playoff hopes with a 12-10 record.
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“She’s an amazing basketball player,” said Mystics forward Kiki Iriafen, who will be joining Citron at the All-Star Game on July 25 in Chicago, as they became the first WNBA teammates in 27 years to make the All-Star roster in each of their first two seasons. “You can already see a huge jump from Year 1 to Year 2, and [she] had an incredible Year 1.”
Entering this week, only four players in the WNBA were averaging at least 18 points, four rebounds and three assists per game: 2024 rookie of the year Clark, 2025 rookie of the year Paige Bueckers, 2026 rookie of the year favorite Olivia Miles and Citron. And when you sort that quartet by true shooting percentage — an advanced metric that measures overall shooting efficiency from two-point and three-point range, plus free throws — Citron’s .635 mark tops them all.
“Her normal,” Mystics coach Sydney Johnson said, “is a lot of other people’s great.”
“She’s a silent killer,” teammate Shakira Austin marveled.
Citron may not be as nationally famous as the other players on that list — which is perfectly fine with the self-described introvert — but WNBA coaches, by necessity, have become quite attuned to the threat she presents on the court.
This is perhaps best evidenced by another advanced metric: “player gravity,” which measures how much attention a player commands from opposing defenses compared to what the spacing on the floor would predict. (During the 2025-26 NBA season, for example, the league leaders were Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Anthony Edwards.) This season, Citron ranks behind only Toronto’s Marina Mabrey as the top focus of opposing defenses.
“If you take one thing away, she gets to the next action. She’s like [Bueckers] in that way, in that they just flow through the game,” said Fever coach Stephanie White. “They don’t get rushed. They don’t get sped up. [Citron] is a tough matchup because you have to play her honest. You have to play her straight-up. And when you do, she reads it and reacts to it quickly.”
It is typical for collegiate stars entering the WNBA to see their numbers fall as a professional — and that is true for Bueckers, Miles and Clark. But Citron, selected by the Mystics with the No. 3 overall pick in the 2025 draft, is outperforming her Notre Dame production to a significant degree.
In part, that’s a function of who she played with in South Bend: three seasons with Miles, a pure point guard who led the ACC in assists in each of those seasons, and two alongside Hannah Hidalgo, a dynamic scorer who has averaged 23.9 points per game through her first three collegiate seasons.
Meantime, Citron, who has three inches on Miles and seven inches on Hidalgo, functioned more as a traditional wing, playing mostly off the ball, setting screens and leveraging her size to post up smaller guards. It was a similar story in 2025 when Citron first arrived in Washington, where All-Star point guard Brittney Sykes ran the Mystics’ offense, and Citron settled into her usual off-ball role.
But a process that began when she first arrived in D.C. — Citron taking on a bigger role in the offense than she was used to at Notre Dame — sped up following the August 2025 trade that sent Sykes to the Seattle Storm. The Mystics’ coaching staff sat Citron down and told her, in so many words, the team’s offense from that point on was going to be run through her.
“We saw a player who was highly, highly efficient, with a very low-level usage,” said Mystics assistant coach and director of player development Clinton Crouch. “I wouldn’t say she was in shock, but she was kind of like, ‘Are you sure you’re talking to me?’ But while she may have been shocked we’re having this conversation, all the numbers back it up. We basically said, ‘Get used to wearing this hat.’
“If she can do this now, and we’ve got a long way to go, imagine what kind of player she can become. And now the whole world is seeing that.”
The process has continued through 2026. Despite the presence of three point guards on the Mystics’ roster — including 2025 first-round pick Georgia Amoore — it is a rare offensive possession when the ball doesn’t wind up in the hands of Citron, whose stats this season are marks she hasn’t hit since she was a McDonald’s All-American at Ursuline High in New Rochelle, New York.
“At Notre Dame, she didn’t play as the featured player, if you will,” said Johnson. “We asked her to do that in D.C., and that takes some growth. But at the same time, we’ve never asked her to do anything she can’t do … The more touches you get, and you’re still able to produce at a high level — that’s the mark of a great player.”
When Citron decides to take over a game (or more accurately, when she is told to take it over), the results can be breathtaking — as when she scored a career-high 32 points in the Mystics’ four-overtime win over the Portland Fire on June 28. With six minutes left in regulation, Citron had just seven points, but she scored 25 across the game’s final 26 minutes to lift the Mystics to a win. The 52 minutes 33 seconds she played in that game, including no breaks after the third quarter, were more than anyone else on the floor and the sixth-most minutes in a single game in WNBA history.
“It’s a super-big adjustment doing what I’m doing now,” Citron acknowledged. “A lot of times I’m uncomfortable doing something I’ve never done before. They want me to take more shots, or they want me to be more involved [in the offense]. All of that is an adjustment for me. … There’ve been some bumps in the road, but I’m learning through experience.”
The only downside to Citron’s emergence is the fact it has become more difficult for her to remain under the radar. She may never reach Clark’s stratosphere as a marketing sensation and cultural lightning rod — not that she wants to — but even her lesser level of WNBA stardom has forced her out of her comfort zone.
“I’m definitely more introverted. I don’t love all the hoopla,” she said. “But at the same time, knowing what comes with being an athlete in the WNBA — I know I can’t avoid this.”
It may be just a matter of time, in other words, until some selfie-seeking autograph hound approaches Caitlin Clark in a restaurant and, before she can even reach for her Sharpie, asks her: “Excuse me, are you Sonia Citron?”
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