The Mystics sit in ninth place, one slot out of the playoffs, after the opening 18 games left their roster looking more like a triage unit than one carefully constructed. Saturday’s win snapped a season-worst four-game losing streak and surely will make their time off more enjoyable.
“It’s a miserable month if you lose that last game before the break,” Coach Mike Thibault said. “I’ve been there before, and it’s a long month. Players can go and get some rest and feel good about it.”
Tina Charles had 34 points, including the tying basket to force overtime, and grabbed a season-high 17 rebounds as she surpassed 25 points for the seventh consecutive game — a career and franchise high. She has a league-leading eight 30-point games, the most in franchise history. Ariel Atkins added 14 points, and Shatori Walker-Kimbrough, who entered the starting lineup, finished with 12. Charles and Atkins are headed to Las Vegas to join the Olympic team and play in the WNBA All-Star Game on Wednesday.
“34 and 17 — like, what?” Atkins said. “That’s crazy.”
“Oh, it means everything,” Charles said of the win. “To come off this break, feeling good about ourselves, knowing that we can grind out wins. I didn’t want to lose the game. ... I think all game I was very assertive just finding my spots and just being where the ball [was].”
For Chicago (10-10), Candace Parker had 17 points, 13 rebounds, six assists, two steals and two blocks. She became the ninth player in league history to record 3,000 rebounds. Stefanie Dolson had a team-high 20 points, Courtney Vandersloot added 13 points and 15 assists, and Allie Quigley scored 16 points off the bench.
The Mystics had just eight players available Saturday, and they certainly are as thankful for the Olympic break as any team in the league. The hope is Elena Delle Donne (back) progresses to the point that she can return in August after a pair of surgeries have kept her out for the entire season. The original thought was that she would miss just a handful of games. Thibault said she will take a week off and then return to work with coaches for a week. The Mystics hope she can begin playing with contact and practice with the team that third week.
Myisha Hines-Allen and Erica McCall, who have knee injuries, were out again, and Washington also was without Leilani Mitchell, who joined the Australian Olympic team. Natasha Cloud returned from an ankle injury and was supposed to be on a restriction, but she played 33 minutes after Thibault expected her to stay in the 20s. She finished with seven points and 11 assists.
Atkins missed what would have been a game-winning three-pointer at the end of regulation, but Charles grabbed the offensive rebound and put it back to force overtime with the score knotted at 82. The Mystics then scored the first six points of overtime, including a Charles pull-up three with a hand in her face. The Sky turned over the ball on three of four possessions during one rough stretch of overtime, including a steal by Atkins with 41.2 seconds left and Chicago trailing 88-83.
“We needed it. We really needed it,” Atkins said. “Just as far as shifting the energy and what we’ve been doing. We had a really good week of practice. Just to see kind of the end result of that, it feels really good. . . . It was just like a breath of fresh air because we’ve been feeling the energy shift, so we felt good to actually get a result out of it.”
The Mystics went into halftime with a 46-44 lead that felt as if it should have been larger. A 14-2 run highlighted by nine straight points from Charles put 11 points between the teams, and Washington finished the first quarter with a 31-22 edge.
The second quarter included a scare when Atkins crumpled to the floor after colliding face-to-face with Chicago’s Diamond DeShields. She left the game and sat on the bench with a towel on her head before going to the locker room. Atkins returned late in the second quarter and appeared no worse for wear. But the offense disappeared for the Mystics in the second quarter. They managed just 15 points and turned the ball over seven times.
But Washington did what it needed to do to force overtime, then took over.
“At the end of the game, when we needed stops, we got stops,” Thibault said. “And I think that’s a bonding thing for a team going into the break that you played against a good team and you could get defensive stops when you most needed it at the end.”
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