WASHINGTON — When Cotie McMahon got to Ohio State as a freshman, a lot about her routine changed from high school. One of the things she added in was watching the film of every game later that night, no matter how late the team got home.
“That’s kind of my way of relaxing myself after a game because I definitely don’t go right to sleep,” McMahon told reporters at the Mystics’ preseason media day. “So I just thought, ‘Well, since I’m up, I might as well just watch film.’”
The film study helped McMahon calm her mind and eventually fall asleep. But it also helped her learn from her mistakes and adjust to new systems and roles. In part because of what she learned from those late-night sessions, McMahon became a four-time all-conference player at Ohio State and Mississippi, an honorable mention AP All-American as a senior, and the No. 11 pick in the 2026 WNBA Draft.
Now as a rookie with the Washington Mystics, McMahon has kept up her film routine, and it’s helped her settle in at the professional level.
So far this season, the 6’ McMahon is averaging 6.6 points, 2.5 rebounds and 1.9 assists in 20.6 minutes per game. She has started four games and is shooting 37.8% from 3-point range on 2.2 attempts per game. And beyond the box score, she’s brought a toughness and a relentlessness that have rubbed off on her teammates.
“She’s got some swagger on the floor, but some humility in terms of learning the [WNBA] game … that is really, really impressive,” Mystics head coach Sydney Johnson told reporters after a win over the Minnesota Lynx on June 21.
When McMahon was drafted to Washington, she knew there would be an opportunity to play immediately on a team that was rebuilding around its young players. The Mystics are the youngest team in the WNBA this season and the second-youngest in league history.
But in preseason, McMahon admitted that the transition to the pro level was challenging. “I’m an overthinker and I’m kind of a perfectionist and I’m really hard on myself,” she told The IX Basketball on April 25, after the team’s first preseason game. “But talking to the coaches, they’re just instilling confidence in me.”
McMahon missed the first two games of the season with an elbow injury but made a splash in her WNBA debut, putting up 13 points, five rebounds and two assists in 30 minutes in an overtime win over the Indiana Fever. From there, her production and minutes fluctuated, including playing just four minutes and 36 seconds against the Los Angeles Sparks on May 29. Yet Johnson insisted after that game that McMahon was doing exactly what the coaches wanted and pointed to her as a prime example of how the Mystics are developing players.
“The few minutes that she played today, you have no idea how good those minutes were in terms of areas that we’ve asked her to address,” he said. “So we can go to the next game … [and] she has a better feel for how she can be successful in this league. … So really happy with her minutes, really happy with how she’s showing up and holding herself accountable and taking the challenge, and there’s a bright future.”
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Part of the development process for McMahon has been continuing to grow as a perimeter player. At both Ohio State and Mississippi, she was listed as a forward, though she began to add perimeter skills to complement her ability to get to the rim and score. As a junior, her 3-point percentage and volume both jumped, and she also improved her midrange game. After she transferred to Mississippi for her senior season, her assist rate doubled, as head coach Yolett McPhee-McCuin had her play point guard at times. That got the ball in her hands more and allowed her teammates to follow her lead.
“I just knew I had to unlock something else in my bag,” McMahon said at media day. “Obviously, my downhill game is something that will forever be strong, but I just knew that in order for me to kind of be successful throughout my whole career, I would need to be a versatile player.”
The Mystics see McMahon as a perimeter player and list her exclusively as a guard. But the team’s offensive philosophy discourages most midrange shots, so that’s been another adjustment for McMahon.
“It’s either in the paint [for] a two or a three, so there’s kind of no in-between here,” McMahon told The IX Basketball on June 24. “So [I’m] just really taking a step away from my midrange game and really focusing on my 3-point and then my inside game.”
McMahon is a strong, physical player in the mold of Phoenix Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas, Fever forward Myisha Hines-Allen or Chicago Sky guard Natasha Cloud. She has used her strength, combined with her quickness and agility, especially well to attack the basket in transition. She’s scoring 16.8% of her points on fast breaks, which puts her in the top 20% of WNBA players who have played at least 12 games this season. When she grabs a defensive rebound with space in front of her, there’s sometimes a different look in her eye as she turns upcourt. That’s something the Mystics noticed about her in college and are encouraging her to continue doing.
“She does have a unique ability where she can corral that rebound and bust out, and that’s much of what we saw at Ohio State and Ole Miss,” Johnson said on June 26. “I just saw a player that could switch end to end in a really unique way that not a ton of players in our league can do.”
“In transition, she’s just full speed to the rim, and she’s going to dare you to get in front of her,” Atlanta Dream head coach Karl Smesko told reporters before facing the Mystics on Thursday. “She’s been really good like that.”
Since mid-June, McMahon has seemingly found another gear. Over her past nine games, she is averaging 7.1 points and 2.2 assists per game, up from 6.1 points and 1.6 assists in her first eight games. That’s partly because she’s averaging 5.5 more minutes in the past nine games, but it’s also because she’s shooting 41.7% from 3-point range on 2.7 attempts per game, compared with 30.8% on 1.6 attempts in her first eight games.
McMahon has also managed to reduce her fouling significantly while still being physical on both ends of the court. She began the season averaging 6.0 fouls per 40 minutes, but over her last nine games, she’s committing just 2.5 fouls per 40 minutes. That helps her stay on the court longer, and it can also help create transition opportunities, if she’s forcing misses or turnovers rather than stoppages in play.
McMahon’s best game of the season arguably came in the win over the Lynx, when she scored a career-high 15 points on 4-for-4 3-point shooting and added five assists. She was just the sixth Mystic ever — and the first rookie — to have 15 points and five assists in a game off the bench.
“She’s building game by game,” guard Georgia Amoore told The IX Basketball on June 28. “She’s adding more stuff to her to her bag. And I think that Minnesota game at Minny was amazing. … It wasn’t easy threes [she hit]; it was like side steps. And she’s built for the moment, and she keeps rising to the occasion.”
“It’s great to see how well she’s playing,” guard Lucy Olsen told The IX Basketball on June 24. “Knocking down the three, that’s awesome because we really need to space the floor. And I think … in the beginning, everyone [around the league] knows her game is get downhill, get downhill, so I think she really adjusted well to being like, ‘I have more than that.’ We all knew she had more than that.”
On June 28, McMahon had just 5 points in a quadruple overtime win over the Portland Fire, but 2 of them helped seal the game. She checked in with 1:37 to go in the fourth overtime, not having played since the fourth quarter and not having scored since the first quarter. But on her first offensive possession, she drove to the rim and made a layup to tie the game at 120.
“Cotie comes in, and immediate impact,” veteran forward Michaela Onyenwere told reporters postgame about that moment. “… She’s somebody who people can’t stop. … She had sat for like 20 minutes at that point, but it didn’t even matter. She stayed ready.”
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Despite the strides McMahon has made in recent weeks, though, she didn’t talk about any of that when she was asked what she’d learned from watching extra film at night. Instead, she said she’d noticed how connected her team was and seen “it translate on the court in tough situations.”
Johnson has seen that togetherness, too, including in tight wins over the league-leading Lynx, the fifth-place New York Liberty and the seventh-place Dream recently. And after a 2-point loss to the Lynx on June 24, he credited his players for having full belief that they could be connected enough and good enough to beat the Lynx for the second time in four days.
“The expectation to be in games and win games is something that is starting to emerge with this group. … It takes time to get there, and we want to cement that,” said Johnson, whose Mystics are currently in eighth place at 10-9. “So how do you get there? You put your work in, your player development, your film. You need your reps; you need these experiences.”
One reason the Mystics are believing in themselves is because they’ve gotten it done in clutch minutes already this season. (The WNBA defines clutch minutes as those when the score is within 5 points in the last five minutes of regulation or in overtime.) Through Saturday, they’ve played a league-high 81 clutch minutes across 13 games and gotten a league-best eight clutch wins. That’s despite playing only 19 games so far while other teams have played as many as 22.
But another reason for the Mystics’ self-belief is because the energy and the toughness McMahon plays with give everyone else a bit of swagger, too. That’s invaluable for a young team that is still figuring out the pro game and facing unfamiliar situations.
“She just has a specific tenacity that just comes with her,” Amoore said.
“When you have a player or players like that, they give you a bit of confidence in terms of, when things get tough, that somebody can unlock something,” Johnson said on June 26.
“I think it elevates us,” guard Sonia Citron told The IX Basketball on June 28. “When you see how hard she plays … [and] just the energy that she brings, it almost makes you want to play even harder.”
Though the Mystics know there’s a lot of work ahead to get to where they want to be, they are taking on some of McMahon’s relentlessness and self-belief. That might be her most important contribution to the team this season because of how it reaches everyone on the roster.
McMahon showed that tenacious mindset when she was asked what it was like playing against players who are often five years, sometimes 10 years, older than her.
“I don’t even think about it like that,” she said. “I mean, we just go out there and take on whoever’s in front of us.”
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.
