No one’s had a better WNBA offseason than the Washington Mystics. That was already true following last week’s megadeal to acquire Elena Delle Donne from the Chicago Sky, but Monday’s follow-up bombshell, which arrived with the news that the Mystics had signed guard Kristi Toliver as an unrestricted free agent, takes the team’s roster into territory few teams can visit. It has other WNBA players reacting like this:
Toliver’s elite tool is three-point shooting, and she made them at a 42.4 percent clip last season for the WNBA champion Los Angeles Sparks, good for fourth in the WNBA; her addition gives the Mystics an elite floor-spacer. That’s always a good thing to have, although it’s nicer still to have more than one. The top three-point shooter in the WNBA last year was Emma Meesseman, the young stretch four that Mystics coach/GM Mike Thibault refused to deal in the Delle Donne trade. Delle Donne, if you were curious, ranked third.
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To recap: three of the top four three-point shooters in the league now play in Washington. That lineup will also include Ivory Latta, who struggled returning from a knee injury last year but ranked sixth in the league in three-point accuracy as recently as 2015. Rounding out the lineup are Natasha Cloud or Tayler Hill, each of whom shot better than 33 percent from deep.
Even without Toliver, the Mystics offered a near-impossible set of match-ups for opponents, thanks to the twin pillars of the inside-outside game, Meesseman and Delle Donne. The acquisition of Toliver reinforces the “positionless basketball” concept Thibault has been preaching since forever, and gets his team somewhere close to the platonic ideal of it.
“We’ve been trying to acquire those kinds of players, but certainly, in terms of flexibility, she takes it to another level,” Thibault said last week of Delle Donne during a conference call. “The fact that she grew up handling the ball, growing up as a point guard, the fact that she’s played with her back to the basket and at the three-point line, the fact that we have several other players who do that—I’ve been dreaming for weeks now of putting her and Emma on either side of the floor, and the matchup problems that it causes. That becomes positionless basketball. And that’s the direction the game is going.”
This is not just a collection of pure spot-up shooters, either. The Mystics will attack the basket even more now, taking advantage of spacing challenges that the league has never seen. Hill already ranked fourth in the league in free throw attempts, while both Latta and Delle Donne share the ability to get to the basket with exceptional free-throw accuracy. Thibault set an offensive goal as leading the league in assists, and it doesn’t sound far-fetched, even without an obvious natural point guard on the floor.
That is not to say the Mystics have it all figured out. Cloud is the only natural point guard on the team, and she struggled to find consistency last season during her rookie year. If the Mystics play Toliver and Latta together, either of them can distribute. But that’s a “could” first and foremost: each typically looks for her shot, and both fit in better off the ball. And there’s no one on the roster right now that comfortably allows the Mystics to go big and create further matchup issues with Delle Donne and Meesseman.
There’s also the question of defense, which Thibault jokingly referred to in passing, after talking about waking up in the middle of the night to plan offensive schemes: “We’ll figure out the defensive part later.” Games against Minnesota (with Sylvia Fowles) and Phoenix (with Brittney Griner) will require they do so sooner than later.
It’s worth noting that the Mystics were ninth in the 12-team WNBA in defensive efficiency last year, and gave up a key interior defender in Stefanie Dolson in the Delle Donne trade. It’s hard to know how well Delle Donne can defend because she was asked to do so much on both ends in Chicago, but both her Defensive Win Shares and Defensive Rating dropped last season. And while Toliver played for the league’s second-rated defense in Los Angeles last season, her defensive rating was last on the team.
Still, it is both entirely possible and a lot of fun to win in basketball by outscoring opponents, and no team in the league is better prepared to do that than the Washington Mystics. A league that appeared to belong to the Sparks and Lynx for the next few years just got a new superteam.
