“What is wrong with me?” Washington Mystics point guard Georgia Amoore asked Kala Flagg, the team’s head of athlete rehabilitation.
It was mid-August, and the Mystics were in Las Vegas for two straight games against the Aces. And Amoore, playing her first season since tearing her ACL in April 2025, was mired in a slump. In five games between Aug. 7 and 15, including both games in Las Vegas, Amoore totaled just 3 points on 1-for-17 shooting.
She didn’t feel like herself during that stretch. But she broke out of it about a week after that trip, just in time for the Mystics’ final push toward the playoffs.
Looking back on her rookie year on Thursday, Amoore told reporters she was proud to have played in all 46 games, including the regular season and playoffs. It was an accomplishment in itself that her knee held up for a full season. But she never felt like she got all the way back to Georgia Amoore, the guard who had terrorized defenses in college with her array of moves and flair for hitting big shots.
So whereas the focus last offseason was getting healthy again, this offseason will be about becoming the player she knows she can be.
“It was ‘return to play’ last offseason,” Amoore said. “Now it’s ‘return to G’ because I was playing, [but] I wasn’t G.”
Amoore tore her ACL early in training camp in 2025, just weeks after being drafted sixth overall. Still, she spent the season around the team, watching and learning all she could. She took notes on a padfolio during games and pointed out things she saw to her teammates. She was trying to make them better, even without being on the court with them.
In the offseason, Amoore took only a brief trip home to Australia so she could spend most of her time rehabbing in Washington. By the time training camp opened, she’d been able to play without restrictions for some time, and she stepped right into the Mystics’ starting lineup.
“I gotta just act like I belong,” she told herself early in the season as she tried to settle in on the court.
“I know I belong,” she explained on Thursday, “but it was like, this is my first time here, too.”
Amoore got off to a decent start, recovering from committing five turnovers in her debut to put up 7 points and seven assists two days later. She had 13 points and six assists in just her fourth WNBA game on May 18. But she wasn’t playing up to her own standard.
“I expected everything from myself early on, and it just wasn’t going to happen,” she said.
The Mystics coaching staff decided to simplify things by having her focus on a few core elements of her game, including shooting 3-pointers and initiating the offense. At times, she even played off the ball as guard Sonia Citron ran the point more, which gave Amoore more catch-and-shoot opportunities.
Most of all, Amoore had to figure out how to give herself grace as she acclimated to the professional level. That felt uncomfortable because she’d rarely done it before; as a 5’6 guard, she’d long known she had little room for error to reach the highest level.
“I struggled a lot during the year trying to be like, ‘I know I have to be better than what I am, but at the same time, I can’t do anything but to go through it,’” she said. “… There was embarrassment. … But I think in those moments, I just fell back on the fact that in my soul, I knew it was knee-centric, and I knew that I was going to be better physically.”
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Even when she’s struggling, Amoore prides herself on being “a rock” for her teammates. She wants to be the player on the bench who has the right words when a teammate subs out and is upset, and she wants to be the player on the court who settles a teammate down before they get a technical foul.
“Georgia is … super steady,” forward Kiki Iriafen told reporters on Thursday. “She’s always looking out for her teammates and [thinking], ‘How can I create for you?’ She’s so selfless, and as a point guard, that’s huge and that’s necessary. And I know she’s had a lot going on with coming back from injury, but she’s always showed up and been consistent as a teammate, even when it’s been hard.”
This season, Amoore also learned about the power of letting her teammates, particularly center Shakira Austin, be her rock at times. Austin has dealt with several injuries in her pro career but finished second in WNBA Most Improved Player voting after a healthy 2026 season.
“She was really good for me, just one-on-one conversations or just reassuring [me] that I’ll be fine,” Amoore said. “Even her mum came up to me and was preaching to me one postgame, and I was like, ‘You know what? Yeah, I do need these.’”
Meanwhile, Amoore was also learning how to lead as a rookie point guard in the WNBA. She has long been comfortable in leadership roles, but it’s different at the pro level. Some of her teammates this season were much more experienced than she was, and everyone had a high basketball IQ already, so she didn’t always know what to say.
“At the start of the season, I was trying to find the words,” she said. “I’m trying to preach to myself, I’m trying to tell some person this, and I should probably be listening to my own words.”
About midway through the season, Amoore noticed some subtle changes in how she was playing. She was being more assertive about exploiting mismatches she saw, even if the play didn’t call for it. She’d also gotten more comfortable telling her teammates what to do — and they’d been ready to follow her since Day 1.
That communication was part of the reason why, even as Amoore struggled in Las Vegas, Johnson said he needed her on the court to close the game. Like Iriafen, Johnson saw a selfless player who was going to do everything possible to get the team to make the right play, regardless of how she was playing or how many shots she’d gotten.
“There were some things that we were very intentional that we wanted to do offensively in terms of our execution,” Johnson told reporters on Aug. 13, after the second game in three days against the Aces. “And I was really, really happy with what we did there, and in some of those minutes, Georgia was a part of helping us get to what we were looking to get to. … We seemed to have a better flow there on the offensive end with her.”
He reiterated his faith in her as the starting point guard 10 days later, saying, “She gives us everything she can. We’re not going anywhere. We’re waiting on her. … If she’s the one who needs to close a game, I have full confidence.”
One day late in the season, Amoore woke up and noticed that her body felt different — “pretty freaking good again,” in her words. Then she could take a deep breath because she knew the worst was behind her.
Soon, she started to be more aggressive hunting her shot. Through her first 34 games, she’d averaged 5.5 shot attempts per game, including 3.9 from 3-point range. In the last 10 games of the regular season, those numbers increased to 8.1 and 6.1, respectively, and she made a lot more of them, too.
“I got to a point a couple of games ago where I was like, ‘OK, come on now. You gotta be a little bit more aggressive,’” Amoore said on Aug. 27, after she’d scored a career-high 25 points against the Phoenix Mercury on 9-for-16 shooting, including 6-for-11 from three. “… I joke because I think in the last two games, I took two terrible shots, but I think that was part of the journey of trying to find that aggression again. And it’s really just been patience and figuring it out.”
Amoore scored 16 of her points in the fourth quarter, lifting the Mystics to a win near the end of an exhausting stretch of 12 games in 24 days. No other player on either team had more than 5 points in the quarter.
She also showed how much she’s grown defensively, which is something she is particularly proud of. (Asked postgame about her biggest improvement this season, she quipped, “My defense! You watch my college clips?”) With about four minutes to go before halftime, the Mystics bench erupted at the sight of Amoore cutting off Phoenix drives twice in a single possession.
And as the clock ticked down on the Mystics’ win, the bench started to chant her name. Soon, her teammates surrounded her on the court, and Iriafen hoisted her in the air in celebration.
“Georgia’s amazing,” Citron had told reporters two days earlier. “… She’s our leader; she’s our point general. She gets us into our offense, she knows when to call what, and her energy is just infectious. So just really happy for Georgia. I feel like things are getting a little easier for her. And … her impact just goes way beyond what you can see. She’s everything for us.”
Over her last 10 regular-season games, Amoore averaged 11.8 points per game and made 50.8% of her 3-pointers, up from 5.6 points on 28.0% shooting earlier in the season. And she maintained her 3.4 assists per game even as she called her own number more.
“We’re a different team,” Johnson said on Sept. 17 about the impact of Amoore’s hot shooting. “… It’s taken some time for her to just kind of get in her groove and just be fully back to who she is, and you can see that swagger. But we’ve never, never doubted her 3-point shot.”
Not coincidentally, the Mystics went 8-2 in that stretch, which helped them get the No. 5 seed in the playoffs. A win over the Indiana Fever on Sept. 20 was especially crucial, as it allowed the Mystics to not only catch the Fever in the standings but also win the season series, which is the first tiebreaker for seeding. In that game, Amoore had 11 points on 4-for-6 shooting and four assists.
“I was cashing out in practice, and now it’s just making its way to the games,” Amoore said that night. “And I’m not even mad because we’re hitting our strides at the right time. I’d rather hit [shots] now and when they matter than early on, when they don’t really matter.”
Though the Mystics were swept by the Atlanta Dream in the first round of the playoffs, Amoore did her part in Game 1, putting up 8 points, four rebounds and three assists. Her shot wasn’t falling in Game 2, but she cut her turnovers in half despite facing waves of pressure from the Dream.
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This offseason, Amoore will play in Australia’s WNBL, which is one of the top leagues in the world. That will allow her to be much closer to her family after playing her college and WNBA seasons half a world away. But just as importantly, Amoore believes the WNBL is set up well for her to rediscover her best self, with fewer games and more practices per week than in the WNBA.
Amoore wants to bring back her midrange and pullup shots, which she largely eschewed this season. She also wants to get better at creating off of ball screens and attacking the rim. She saw Citron’s growth in those two areas this season and fully supported it, even though Citron being on the ball sometimes reduced her minutes. Now, it’s something of a template for her to follow.
“As much as I am proud that people like Sonia developed in that, I gotta get it back, too, so we can be more deadly going forward,” Amoore said.
When the Mystics’ season abruptly ended on Sept. 30, in a loss where they didn’t play their best, the players lingered in the locker room. They had become an unusually close-knit group, and they weren’t ready to close this chapter of their lives together.
So Amoore invited everyone to her apartment, to give them all a little more time to be teammates.
At first, they tried to process the game. Then they got “delirious,” Amoore said, giggling about everything and nothing. Then they went deep, processing their season and everyone’s ups and downs.
“Everyone has their own things that they go through throughout the year, and you may know some, you might not know some,” she said. “So … [that] night was just a cute little kumbaya moment to just be like, ‘Yo, let’s just let it all out.’”
Amoore knows about the ups and downs of a season as much as anyone. Through it all, she has always been a teammate who looks out for everyone else. That held true in her final gesture of the season, when she offered up her apartment and threw her teammates a lifeline.
“I think having moments like that and then going into the offseason, that’s what you remember,” she said. “You come back, and we’re gonna start like we didn’t even have a break from each other.”
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