About an hour before the Washington Mystics played the Seattle Storm on Sunday, Mystics head coach Sydney Johnson spoke with reporters about the importance of defending the 3-point line better. The Mystics entered the game allowing 10.5 3-pointers per game, the most in the WNBA. They were also allowing opponents to shoot 35.6% from deep, which was tied for the third-highest percentage in the league.
To make matters worse, the number of threes allowed and opponents’ shooting percentages were increasing steadily. The Mystics had allowed just five threes to the Toronto Tempo on opening night, followed by nine, 17 and 11. And in that fourth game, a blowout loss to the Dallas Wings, the Wings shot 45.8% from deep.
Despite Johnson’s emphasis on it, though, that part of the game got worse for the Mystics rather than better on Sunday. They lost 97-85 in Seattle, in large part because they allowed the Storm to shoot 13-for-28 from 3-point range (46.4%) and shot just 4-for-20 (20.0%) themselves.
The Mystics also entered the game as the league’s most foul-prone team, and they committed 26 fouls that led to 32 points at the free-throw line for Seattle. That combination of threes and free throws was too much to overcome.
“We just didn’t disrupt enough from the beginning,” center Shakira Austin told reporters postgame. “I think we waited a little too late to get more physical, and I think they just had a great flow with everything that they wanted, whether that was ball screens, whether that was pindowns or back screens. … We just didn’t really take away anything.”
The Mystics, who are easily the league’s youngest team, added a lot of length in this year’s WNBA Draft. The median height of their frontcourt increased by 1.5 inches from the 2025 team, and among the guards, it increased by an inch. But the rookies are still figuring out how to use their length on defense at the pro level — to contest shots and help each other, but not to reach too far and foul.
“We’re going to learn and grow in terms of our rotations and when we need to react and when we need to stay at home,” Johnson said postgame. “So I know that we’re going to get better, and I see small gains, but obviously these last two games in particular, I thought we haven’t done the job that we want in terms of guarding the 3-point line.”
Three-point shooting is volatile, and the Mystics are barely a tenth of the way through their season. So they may be able to clean up their 3-point defense in the games to come. But currently, it’s having an outsized influence on their results.
Entering Sunday, the Mystics were averaging just 5.3 made threes on 26.9% shooting. That combined with their 3-point defense meant that opponents had an advantage of 15.6 points per game, on average, from 3-pointers alone. On Sunday, that advantage was 27 points — 1 more than the Storm’s largest lead of the game.
That gap is negating the Mystics’ sizable advantage in the paint. They were outscoring opponents by 17.0 points per game in the paint through their first four games and beat the Storm by 18 there on Sunday.
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Along with the paint points, there were a few other bright spots for the Mystics in Sunday’s loss. Veteran guard Michaela Onyenwere made her season debut after missing the first four games with a knee injury. She started and had 6 points and a steal in 17:29. She also provided a veteran’s steadiness: With her on the court, the Mystics outscored the Storm by 6 points, which was the best plus-minus on the team.
In addition, point guard Georgia Amoore and forward Angela Dugalić had career-best nights offensively, joining three other Mystics in double figures. Amoore, who was drafted sixth overall in 2025 but missed all of last season with a torn ACL, had a career-high 13 points, six assists, two rebounds and two blocks in a career-high 25:46 before fouling out. Though she shot just 2-for-9 from the field, she hit all eight of her free throws.
“I think she’s still working to get into her groove. She’s got a lot more in the tank,” Johnson said. “But it’s nice to see her get some points, and it always adds to your confidence.”
Dugalić, the No. 9 overall pick in 2026, only played 11:55, yet she poured in 13 points on 5-for-6 shooting. That was more than she’d scored in the first four games combined. She also had three rebounds, an assist and a steal and was the only Mystic besides Onyenwere to have a positive plus-minus.
Nine of Dugalić’s points came in the fourth quarter, which was the only quarter the Mystics won. She got going about 90 seconds into the period, when Amoore dribbled around a Dugalić screen just inside the 3-point line, drew two defenders and bounced a pass behind her back to Dugalić for an open 3-pointer.
“They just come in and work hard every single day,” Austin said about Amoore and Dugalić. “There is not a moment where they’re not communicating to us, communicating to each other to just figure out how to make the team better, but also just get their groove back with Georgia coming back this year. She’s just been really trying to plug herself into helping everybody else be better, but also getting back to who we know she can be.”
Dugalić has been Washington’s fourth forward, and she was the 10th player to check in on Sunday. Her performance shows why Johnson wants to give game minutes to as many players as he can, as part of the player development plan in Washington.
Currently, 10 players who have appeared in multiple games are averaging at least 10 minutes per game. And Johnson has used 70 different five-player lineups through five games, with his most-used lineup only playing 39 of a possible 210 total minutes together. Contrast that with the defending champion Las Vegas Aces, who have used 42 lineups through six games, or the Dallas Wings, who have used 57 through seven games.
“It’s the same thing that we have in practice. We toy with rotations,” Amoore told reporters postgame. “… We’re just learning as we go. … We’re a young team, and I think we’re very moldable right now, so we’re all just trying to figure each other out still and figure out how individually we can be more effective as well.”
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The Mystics will stay in Seattle for a rematch against the Storm on Wednesday. Playing the same opponent twice in a row gives the Mystics a chance to improve on some of what they tried to execute on Sunday. That’s extremely helpful for a team with nine rookies, who are trying to learn opposing personnel every game in addition to mastering the Mystics’ schemes. The personnel piece will be much more familiar on Wednesday, so they can focus more on execution — especially closing out on perimeter shooters and defending without fouling.
“We know exactly what we did wrong, what we did right — the lack thereof, actually,” Amoore said. “So [we’re] just correcting that and having another chance at them.”
“At this point, some of the inexperience shows,” Johnson said. “But that doesn’t last forever. It just doesn’t. So we got to keep coaching; we got to keep playing.”
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.
