If you’ve watched any videos of the Mystics locker room this season, you know the vibe.
A bunch of 23-year-olds being lightly supervised by former Sky forward Michaela Onyenwere, playing dodgeball with their coach and re-enacting scenes from “Love Island.”
They’re the youngest team in the league, enjoying the process of building for the future, without much pressure to succeed right now.
The irony, of course, is that they’re succeeding anyway.
At 21-14, they have the best of both worlds: a great young core, draft capital galore and a chance to make some noise in the playoffs.
The frustrating part is, the Mystics haven’t done anything the Sky couldn’t have done themselves.
They drafted the obvious lottery choices in 2025 and 2026: Sonia Citron, Kiki Iriafen and Lauren Betts. They hired low-profile coaches with ties to Chicago. Head coach Sydney Johnson was one of Teresa Weatherspoon’s top assistants, while offensive coordinator Emre Vatansever was let go after stepping in for James Wade in 2023.
The Mystics did do one pretty special thing, though. One thing the Sky, and many other organizations, have a hard time doing: They accepted that rebuilding would take time.
Washington didn’t fight losing seasons in 2024 and 2025. They didn’t try to skip steps or accelerate their path to the playoffs.
They held onto their draft capital and put themselves in position to benefit from a losing record. Now Citron and Iriafen are All-Stars and the team is sitting solidly in the No. 6 seed, headed for the playoffs ahead of schedule.
The Sky did the opposite.
General manager Jeff Pagliocca has managed with a sense of urgency to compete immediately, uninterested in treating losing seasons as a necessary part of a long rebuild. So he traded away the Sky’s first-round picks in 2026, 2027 and 2028 to jump-start the process.
To his credit, he put together a roster that looked good on paper this season.
But holding on to your draft picks is kind of like disaster insurance. Pagliocca decided to go uncovered.
So when disaster struck — Rickea Jackson tore her ACL, the Sky kept blowing close games and point guard Skylar Diggins barely played — somebody else was positioned to benefit.
That somebody is Washington. The Mystics are set to receive the Sky’s 2027 lottery pick in exchange for their own and also own Chicago’s 2028 first-rounder.
The situation is especially painful because it’s not like the Sky have turned their back on young talent.
Kamilla Cardoso, their No. 3 pick in 2024, has developed into a solid pillar. Sydney Taylor, an undrafted guard plucked from the Polish league, was a home run. Aicha Coulibaly has also turned into a nice second-round find.
That success in identifying youngsters makes you wonder what this might look like if they had just leaned all the way into it.
Imagine if, rather than trying to speed up the process, the Sky had been content to wait. What if they had held onto their disaster insurance? What if they had surrendered to the tide of young talent coming into the league?
Pagliocca would argue that if he hadn’t been so aggressive, he wouldn’t have landed Jackson. And it’s true: The deal that eventually gave Washington so much of the Sky’s draft capital brought Ariel Atkins to Chicago, who was later flipped for Jackson.
Maybe Jackson will be enough to vindicate the strategy in the end.
But for now, the Mystics are the ones having all the fun.
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