When an offense goes cold, the reflex is to find your best player and feed her until it stops. Christy Winters-Scott has missed exactly one Washington Mystics practice this season, and she thinks that instinct would wreck this team. Related stories Kiki Iriafen scores 23 points as Mystics snap Valkyries’ 9-game winning streak with 90-82 victory Gabby Williams hits two late 3-pointers and leads Valkyries to 9th straight win, 74-69 over Mystics Mystics power past short-handed Tempo 79-62 behind double-doubles by Iriafen and Austin “She doesn’t have to be fed to eat,” Winters-Scott said of two-time All-Star Kiki Iriafen, reaching for a metaphor about cutting grapes for a toddler in a high chair.
“The ball finds energy and she is energy.” That is not a broadcaster dodging a question. Winters-Scott is in her 17th season as the Mystics’ color analyst, and for most of that run, she was also the head coach who took South Lakes High in Reston, her alma mater, from 0-21 to 19-4 in four seasons before she stepped away in 2022. So ask her whether the Mystics offense should run through its best interior scorer and she answers as a coach who had to install one.
Her answer is no, and the reason matters more than the verdict. “If you do that, you lose the organic beauty of the game,” Winters-Scott said. Structure an offense around a single entry point and everyone else plays for scraps — bad for spacing, worse for a locker room.
Her alternative is the thing this team already does well: read the coverage and punish it. Winters-Scott pointed to two backdoor cuts to All-Star Sonia Citron in Wednesday’s win over Las Vegas, run twice because the Aces refused to believe they’d see it again. “Straight from the whiteboard to the court,” she said.
So if the answer isn’t a hierarchy, what explains the droughts? The 57 points at Connecticut, the 49 points against Golden State and the 56 points against Portland a week ago? The numbers describe a team at war with itself.
Washington leads the WNBA in rebounding at 37 per game, which means nobody in the league wins more possessions. It also leads the WNBA in turnovers at 16 per game and its 80.8 points rank second-worst in the league. The Mystics get the ball more often than anyone and do less with it than almost everyone.
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