It’s great that the WNBA is experiencing more leaguewide attention. But the team in Washington isn’t giving fans much to root for.
The 2024 WNBA season has been the most exciting in league history. Social media attention is way up, due to the arrival of Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark and Chicago Sky forward Angel Reese entering their rookie seasons. There has also been a lot of discourse around how the two rookies have been adjusting to the more physical game of the WNBA. Clark has been getting literally pushed around by veteran guards, sometimes, just to prove a point like last week. And Reese was ejected from a game yesterday after a loose ball call.
If the discourse around Reese and Clark weren’t enough, the WNBA is expanding by two teams by 2026, with the Golden State Valkyries opening shop next year and Toronto getting another team in 2026.
So all of this is good and healthy for the WNBA. But some team has to be bad as well. Unfortunately, that team is the Washington Mystics. They are currently 0-9 and haven’t won a game of any kind.
At this point, this Mystics season is lost, at least for postseason ambitions. As I have written during the early Mike Thibault years (2013-16), the 12-team WNBA is a very competitive league and a superstar needs to be on a roster for it to realistically compete. Washington at the time had no superstar player until Elena Delle Donne came in 2017 and the team won a championship two years later.
But since the 2019 WNBA championship season, Washington has declined until this season when they began the current rebuild. Rebuilds do involve long periods of losing, but in a 12-team league, there’s no excuse for a team to start out 0-9. And while WNBA fans nationwide are optimistic about the future, Mystics fans are feeling just the opposite since they’ve hardly been in the national picture.
Over the next two days, the Mystics will get in the national spotlight because they will host Reese’s Sky and Clark’s Fever on back-to-back days at Capital One Arena. These games can be a way for Washington to get the season back on track, especially if they can win both contests.
But if the Mystics still lose both games, it will simply accelerate this current trend of the Mystics falling into irrelevance in the WNBA while the league as a whole is thriving. That’s a situation I really don’t want to see Washington in.