The Washington Mystics didn\u2019t just win their franchise-record 27th game of the 2026 WNBA season last night. They also clinched the No. 7 seed in the 2026 WNBA Playoffs after the Dallas Wings lost 87-86 to the Phoenix Mercury on Monday.<\/p>\n
Washington also has some things going for them heading into Thursday when they host the Chicago Sky at Capital One Arena. With a win, the Mystics could clinch the No. 6 overall seed.<\/p>\n
The top three seeds are currently held by the Minnesota Lynx, Golden State Valkyries and Las Vegas Aces. If the playoffs began today, a No. 7 Mystics team would play against the Valkyries who are No. 2. But if the Mystics win tomorrow, they would play against the No. 3 Aces. Either way, this team is playing with house money. Few would have thought that Washington would be playoff bound this season with the youngest roster in WNBA history.<\/p>\n
Now, I don\u2019t want to sound like a Debbie Downer, but I\u2019ll have to qualify the Mystics\u2019 27 wins, which nominally breaks their 2019 record of 26 wins. Back in 2019, the WNBA season was 34 regular-season games. This season, there are 44. Next year, there will be 50. A high-performing team is expected to win well over 20 regular-season games once there are more games to play.<\/p>\n
Assuming Washington goes 28-16 this regular season, that would be the equivalent of a 22-12 regular season back in 2019. Still a very strong record. And yes, the Mystics would have done so facing a lot of adversity. But unless this year\u2019s Mystics win the championship, I\u2019m not on the \u201cthis is the winningest Mystics team ever\u201d bandwagon. Rather, I\u2019m on the \u201cthis is the Mystics team that will start their next era of dominance\u201d bandwagon.<\/p>\n
And the latter seems like a better bandwagon to hop on in my eyes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Washington Mystics didn\u2019t just win their franchise-record 27th game of the 2026 WNBA season last night. They…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":857996,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[99,8253,165604,434],"class_list":["post-857995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-sports","tag-washington-mystics","tag-washington-mystics-team-analysis","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=857995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/857996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=857995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=857995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=857995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}