On Sunday, it was up in the air whether starting center Shakira Austin would play for the Washington Mystics against the Portland Fire. She was a late addition to the injury report with knee soreness, and the team wanted to see how her knee felt in warmups before clearing her to play.
It was also up in the air when the Mystics would clinch a playoff spot. They needed a win over Portland as well as a loss by the Chicago Sky to secure their first playoff appearance since 2023.
But all those things came together for the Mystics on Sunday: Behind a career-high 31 points and 10 rebounds from Austin, they beat the Fire 105-100, and the Sky lost to the Indiana Fever.
That postseason berth cements one of the WNBA’s biggest surprises — and feel-good stories — of the season. The Mystics were expected to be rebuilding, but they’re 22-15 with wins over every other team in the league. Per Mystics PR and the Elias Sports Bureau, the Mystics are the youngest team in WNBA history to make the playoffs, when weighting the players’ average age by minutes played.
“I’m just absolutely elated,” second-year Mystics head coach Sydney Johnson told reporters postgame. “… It’s a clear step forward for our organization. We started the season wanting to ascend and really build on Year 1, and, jeez, I mean, to make the playoffs in Year 2 with the youth of this group is absolutely amazing.”
All season, Johnson has preached to his players that it’s extremely hard to win in the WNBA, and they experienced that again on Sunday. Johnson had to call timeouts early in the first and third quarters as the Fire blitzed the Mystics out of the locker room.
Portland started the game on a 14-4 run, and the Mystics trailed for nearly the entire first quarter. Austin had 2 points on 1-for-5 shooting, and she told reporters postgame that she was “disappointed” in how she played in the period.
“I felt like I was a big reason of why they were able to get such a big lead,” Austin said. “… So I just wanted to be able to play a little bit more at my speed, at my pace, just getting out of my head a little bit. Sometimes when I have something lingering with my body a little, I think it really speeds me up.”
“She looked a little rusty [in the first quarter], and she actually wasn’t feeling that great from yesterday,” Johnson said. “So she really powered through to give us an unbelievable effort [in the] second, third, fourth quarter.”
Austin found her rhythm in the second quarter, scoring 13 points on 5-for-6 shooting to help the Mystics pull within 2 points at halftime. She had an early turnover, but on the next possession, she pulled down an offensive rebound with four Fire players around her and split them to get the putback. About a minute later, she stole the ball, then rebounded two straight misses and scored to make sure the possession paid off for the Mystics.
Austin, who prides herself on leading the Mystics defensively, also had two blocks in the quarter. For the second block, she slid over as the help defender as Portland guard Carla Leite tossed up a circus shot near the rim. Austin smashed the ball so hard with her right hand that it sailed almost to the 3-point line before it hit the court, and teammate Sonia Citron outraced two Portland players to grab it. From there, Citron had just one defender to beat in transition and drew an and-one, which gave the Mystics their first lead of the night at 40-39.
“One thing I try to do is just hold [Austin] to the standard that she wants, which is really, really high,” Johnson said. “She wants to be supported, and she wants to be challenged. And so I’ve got to balance that. … I got on her during the game to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to keep coaching you hard,’ and she’s like, ‘Yeah!’ She gets it. She’s fierce, man. She’s fierce.”
The third quarter felt like déjà vu from the first, as the Fire started on an 11-1 run and eventually led by as many as 14 points with 3:50 left in the quarter. But the Mystics were undeterred. They’d already come back from five double-digit deficits this season, including a 20-point hole against the Dallas Wings on Aug. 5, so they knew they could do it again.
“I’m just super proud of the way that we fought,” Iriafen told reporters afterward. “We did not play the way we needed to in the first quarter. … Even the third quarter, we did not start off the way that we needed to, but we were relentless. We were talking to each other. We didn’t allow each other to hang our heads. … When it was someone’s opportunity to go to work, they went to work. … The grit that we had today is going to take us super far.”
After scoring 5 points in the third quarter, the fourth quarter was Austin’s time to go to work. She had 11 points on 4-for-5 shooting, including scoring on the Mystics’ first three possessions to set the tone. Her baskets chipped away at a 5-point deficit, and once the Mystics tied the game on a 3-pointer from wing Michaela Onyenwere with 7:28 left, they never let Portland lead again.
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Austin also played a crucial role in sealing the win. With the Mystics clinging to a 4-point lead with about two minutes to go, she caught the ball near the free-throw line, took one dribble and pivoted twice to get around Fire forward Emily Engstler for a bank shot from 7 feet out. Then, after missing two free throws with 35 seconds left, Austin atoned by making two with 14 seconds left. Those pushed the Mystics’ lead back to 6 and gave her a career high in scoring.
“She’s the biggest All-Star snub of the year,” said Johnson, who has brought up the topic repeatedly since the All-Star break. “And I think she’s a lock for [WNBA] Most Improved [Player]. She’s a lock for All-Defense. [She] needs serious consideration for All-W.”
“I think we take every matchup personally,” Austin said about herself and Iriafen, who had 18 points on 7-for-11 shooting and 10 rebounds. “Every time we step on the floor, we want to be the best bigs and … really just [set] the tone. We know we’re going to get the ball, the ball’s going to flow through our post, so really just being efficient with that and just being aggressive every time we step on the floor.”
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Several of Austin’s teammates had big games, too, from Iriafen’s double-double to Citron, point guard Georgia Amoore and reserve guard Cotie McMahon all scoring in double figures. Backup center Lauren Betts had 5 points, eight rebounds and three blocks, and in her 17 minutes, the Mystics outscored the Fire by 22 points.
Austin was quick to praise them all postgame, but her own importance to the team cannot be overstated — especially with the tear she’s been on lately.
Overall, Austin is averaging 17.0 points on 48.5% shooting, 9.6 rebounds, 2.5 assists and 1.3 blocks per game this season. But in 11 games since the All-Star break, she has averaged 21.5 points on 52.4% shooting and 9.6 rebounds per game, with seven double-doubles. Along with that productivity, she brings the energy and fire that teammates like Iriafen and McMahon feed off of and draw confidence from.
“We kind of go as she goes,” Iriafen said after a win over the Toronto Tempo on Wednesday. “Her energy is contagious. She’s so vocal. … Everything that she’s done post-All-Star, we’ve seen it. I mean, I’ve seen it. I have to play against her every day in practice. But you can just see another level of confidence and just determination. …
“[And] her leadership, her voice, I would say that’s probably the biggest area of growth. … She has an opportunity to lead this team, and she’s been doing a great job from Day 1. Regardless of if she thinks she has a great performance or not, she’s been pretty consistent with that. So that’s been really huge for our team.”
Washington Mystics center Shakira Austin (0) and guard Rori Harmon leave the court after a win over the Portland Fire at Moda Center in Portland, Ore., on Aug. 23, 2026. (Photo credit: Soobum Im | Imagn Images)
It was doubly fitting, then, that Austin was the one to carry the Mystics to the playoffs. Not only is she the Mystics’ emotional and defensive anchor, but she is also the only player who was on the roster for the franchise’s last playoff appearance. (Guard Betnijah Laney-Hamilton was on the opposite side, helping the New York Liberty sweep the Mystics.) Austin has spoken about how the Mystics not winning a playoff game in her five-year career doesn’t sit well with her, and now she has a chance to change that.
From the beginning of the season, the Mystics’ mindset was “44 and more” — playing 44 regular-season games, then hopefully more in the playoffs. They’d been in or near playoff position for much of the 2025 season, but after they traded away veteran guard Brittney Sykes and others at the trade deadline, they lost their final 10 games and saw their playoff hopes slip away like sand in an hourglass.
“Last year, we were so close … and then we just kept losing and dropping off,” Iriafen said on Sunday. “So … to be able to fix that going into this year, I think, is huge.”
Johnson credited Iriafen for coming up with “44 and more,” whereas he’s been more intent on taking the season one day at a time and trying to maximize players’ development than on looking toward September. But those concepts all turned out to be compatible.
The Mystics did take things one day at a time, which helped them not miss any of the lessons Johnson wanted them to learn along the way. And there were many of them, as the Mystics have played by far the most clutch minutes in the WNBA, endured a four-overtime game against the Fire in June, and learned how to win consistently during a seven-game winning streak in July and August. In those moments, the player development shone up and down the roster.
“If you don’t start the season with where you want to go, then you’re kind of floating,” Johnson said on Aug. 7. “And so I think ‘44 and more’ is really wanting to try to make the postseason. … So there’s the goal-setting, and then there’s a way to get there. Those are the things that have merged.”
Now, with the playoffs a certainty rather than just an aspiration, the Mystics will keep the same mindset and keep trying to raise their standard. Instead of looking at the standings and speculating about their seed, they’re focused on cleaning up their defense for their next game on Tuesday, because they feel like it’s slipped a little bit over the past week.
And though they did celebrate clinching a playoff spot in the locker room after the game, they didn’t dwell on it long. All season, they’ve moved on from wins and losses alike when the clock strikes midnight. That’s because the Cinderella story of the 2026 season knows it can’t turn into a pumpkin in August, before it has a chance to enjoy the postseason ball.
Monumental Sports and Entertainment, the group that owns the Washington Mystics, holds a minority stake in The IX Sports. The IX Sports’ editorial operations are entirely independent of Monumental and all other business partners.
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