WASHINGTON — There are a lot of new faces on the Washington Mystics roster this season. But when the team gathered for a preseason dinner at Sequoia, an upscale American restaurant in the Georgetown neighborhood, the conversation flowed freely and naturally.
“There was not a moment where it was silence,” rookie forward Angela Dugalić told reporters at the Mystics’ media day on April 20. “… We were talking about each other’s lives, our college experiences — everything that you could possibly imagine, we talked about.”
In addition to the newness, the Mystics are also very inexperienced in head coach Sydney Johnson’s second season. Ten of the 16 players on the current roster are WNBA rookies, and only 26-year-old Michaela Onyenwere and 25-year-old Shakira Austin have more than one season of WNBA experience. That gives the team an average of 0.81 years of WNBA experience per player.
No other WNBA team has less than two years of experience on average, and the most seasoned team, the Las Vegas Aces, averages over six years of experience. Even last year, in the first season of the Mystics’ rebuild, they still averaged 3.29 years of experience.
That number will change for every team as rosters are finalized, but the Mystics are unlikely to get much more experienced before the regular season begins. As a result, they have a strong chance to be the least experienced WNBA team in the past 25 seasons.
It’s a similar story when looking at age. Last season, the Mystics were the league’s youngest team until the trade deadline and finished with an average age of 25.88 years old as of July 1, 2025. But this season, they’re much younger. Their average age of 24.11 on July 1, 2026, would make them the second-youngest team in WNBA history, behind only the 2020 New York Liberty.
“I know we’re gonna give Coach Syd some headaches, just being super young,” second-year forward Kiki Iriafen told reporters at media day. “But I’m just really excited to play with this young group.”
Johnson understands the value of having veteran leadership, but he, Monumental Basketball president Michael Winger and the others making personnel decisions by committee leaned this hard into a youth movement on purpose. They want to build on last season, when the Mystics exceeded expectations in large part because then-rookies Iriafen and guard Sonia Citron made an immediate impact.
Those two are now half of the Mystics’ core, along with Austin and point guard Georgia Amoore, who missed all of last season with a torn ACL but is ready to make her WNBA debut. (Some of this year’s draft picks could soon be part of that core, but Johnson isn’t putting those expectations on them yet.)
“We’re not starting from scratch,” Johnson told reporters at media day. “We’ve already made some great gains, and we want to just be in a much better position … at the end of the season with these players.”
Johnson also envisions building up the Mystics’ veteran leadership — not by adding another experienced player, but by developing and empowering Citron, Amoore and Iriafen as leaders.
“They’re growing up right in front of our eyes,” he said. “And that doesn’t equate to a 10-year vet, but it equates to something. I’m already turning to them and leaning on them for leadership in ways, small and big ways, that I couldn’t last year. … And frankly, I wanted to make room for that.”
For Amoore, vocal leadership comes naturally, and she did it at times even while sidelined last season. But Citron is much quieter, and as a rookie, she was happy to hang back and let the veterans lead.
This season, Citron knows that has to be different. She’s still not loud, but she’s started leading more in her own way, by pulling teammates aside and talking them through things.
“I still see myself as a rookie, and I have to remind myself, ‘You’re not,’” she said at media day. “… I’ve just been, as one of the more experienced ones, just trying to kind of take initiative this year and kind of take on that role of being more of a leader. So yeah, it’s definitely different.”
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While training camp is always a whirlwind for rookies, who go nearly straight from the college season to the WNBA Draft and then to camp, the large group of young players in Washington has made acclimating to the pros easier. Amoore and rookie center Lauren Betts both said that the young players generally know about one another from playing against each other in college, which gave them a head start on building chemistry.
“You’re not trying to figure anyone out [for] the first time on Day 1,” Amoore told reporters on the first day of camp.
“I played all these girls, so I feel like we have so much to talk about,” Betts said at media day. “And we’re all transitioning to this at the same time. So it’s just really special to kind of have that connection with all of them.”
That connection is music to Johnson’s ears, as the goal is to mold the young core into a group that can consistently contend for championships. (Iriafen’s timeline for that: “Hopefully a year or two.”) The hope is that building close relationships on and off the court will lead to winning plays when everything is on the line.
“Our coaches … emphasize every day that, yes, we’re playing basketball, but it’s bigger than that,” Iriafen said. “We’re a family, we’re sisters, we’re people and we truly care about each other. So I think approaching the game from that sense … is only going to set us up for success when we do get in those big championship moments because we’re selfless. We care about each other. We’re going to make that extra play, that extra pass, to make sure that we get the right possession.”
Johnson plans to bridge the gap between this stage of the Mystics’ rebuild and championship contention by continuing to emphasize player development, much like in his first season in 2025.
“Whoever is on our roster, our commitment is full-out player development for everybody,” he said.
The conventional wisdom is that it’s hard for players to make big jumps in skill during the season because the WNBA schedule is so compressed and there is little practice time. But the routine that player development lead Clinton Crouch has had with Citron since she entered the league shows how the Mystics approach it. They do short workouts that aren’t too physically taxing, which they call “daily vitamins,” to fine-tune parts of Citron’s game. Over time, the small tweaks add up, particularly when they’re happening up and down the roster.
The Mystics also aren’t starting from scratch this season when it comes to the style they want to play. But they hope to get closer to Johnson’s ideal than they did in 2025.
Offensively, they want to play fast, which for Johnson means getting a good shot off in the first eight seconds of the shot clock. Last season, they tried to do that, but they had the second-highest turnover rate in the league and ranked only 11th out of 13 teams in the percentage of their shots that came in the first eight seconds.
“We’re drilling that already, one day into training camp,” second-year guard/forward Madison Scott said at media day. “… I think that everyone that’s here is able to play fast … [and] we have to continue to learn that playing fast isn’t playing out of control.”
“It’s cool that we’re really young because we all have fresh legs,” second-year guard Lucy Olsen added. “… So I think playing fast fits right into us as well. … We’re all gonna be in great shape. But if anyone gets tired, the next five are coming in and they’re ready to do the same exact thing.”
Johnson also wants the Mystics to take pride in their ball movement and put a lot of pressure on the rim, whether that’s from the 6’7 Betts and the 6’5 Austin attacking in the paint or 6’ rookie guard/forward Cotie McMahon driving from the perimeter. Both Betts and McMahon showed that in the team’s first preseason game on Saturday, as 19 of their 24 points combined were on layups or free throws. (Austin was still overseas and missed the game.)
At the same time, the Mystics know they need to take more threes than they did in 2025 to space the floor better and help the offense flow. Their 17.1 attempts per game last season were easily the fewest in the WNBA. So Johnson is emphasizing “key and three” — get to the paint or shoot a three — and was encouraged to see the Mystics take 20 threes in their first preseason game, even though they made just five.
Defensively, the Mystics added size by drafting Betts, the 6’4 Dugalić and McMahon in the first round, and that will allow them to do some new things. Though the 2026 team is just 0.3 inches taller on average than the 2025 team, this year’s frontcourt players are 1.3 inches taller than last year’s. The average height in the frontcourt is now 6’4, and that is likely to increase slightly when the roster is finalized.
That size will help prevent the Mystics from getting bullied physically, which Johnson thought happened at times last season. It will also allow them to take more risks defensively, knowing that Austin and Betts are both imposing shot blockers, and try to pressure opponents more, not just contain them.
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The Mystics have spent a lot of time early in training camp on just installing their offensive and defensive systems, which makes sense with all of their youth. That can be a lot for players to take in as they also adjust to a new city, league and team. But according to McMahon, the staff has made sure the rookies remember what got them to the WNBA and use that to anchor them.
“Coach isn’t really asking of us to do anything that we weren’t already doing,” she said at media day. “I know for me, he just really instills just remembering what I’m good at and to stick with that, and I don’t have to play out of character or out of body. So just showing up being the same player I was in college to here, I feel like that’s going to make this whole transition easier. [And then it’s] just learning how to adjust and find ways to play with my teammates.”
Not much will be expected of the Mystics this season — and that’s OK. The team is focused much more on what Johnson calls “daily habits” than on whether it’ll surpass last season’s 16 wins. And the process of working each day and turning discrete actions into long-term habits is where Johnson finds the joy that he always coaches with, through winning and losing streaks alike.
“We know where we are, and it’s a good place to be in D.C.,” Johnson told reporters before Saturday’s preseason game. “… We feel like we have some good things going. We know we’re still striving. And when you understand that and you have players who want to work and get better … then I think there’s that real joy and excitement.”
Monumental Sports and Entertainment, the group that owns the Washington Mystics, holds a minority stake in The IX Basketball. The IX Basketball’s editorial operations are entirely independent of Monumental and all other business partners.
Want more team-by-team previews for the 2026 WNBA season? Read them all here!
