Time for Mystics to wake up

By Keith Henry

WASHINGTON- The Washington Mystics aren’t happy with the direction they’re going at the halfway point of WNBA play.

Head coach Tree Rollins stated, “It’s not where I thought we would be. Personally, I didn’t think we would be on six wins. I thought we would have at least double digit wins. We don’t want to get so far behind that you would look at after the (Olympic) break to catch up. It’s natural for players going into a break that we would lose a couple games, concentration wise. Then coming back from a break and take a couple games, concentration wise, to get it back together. So that’s four games that we can’t afford to lose. So as a staff, we’re trying to make them get the full picture that we have to win games.”

At 6-11 and three games behind Indiana and New York for a playoff spot, the Mystics cannot afford to dig a deeper hole for themselves. As they found out in 2007, it’s hard to climb out of a bad situation because even though the Mystics finished tied for the fourth playoff spot, New York got the nod on tiebreakers.

The Mystics have lost three straight games to this point. They stare Indiana in the face on Tuesday at the Verizon Center and they know it doesn’t get much easier. The game with the Fever begins a stretch of eight of the next nine games against their Eastern Conference rivals.

The Mystics are 3-3 in their meetings against their own division. But the three wins were against teams below them in the standings in Chicago and Atlanta. The three losses, however, were to teams above the Mystics in Indiana, New York and Connecticut.

Of their eight games, the next five of them come against all the teams above them. But the Mystics are up to the task. Alana Beard summed up what needed to be done in three words, “Win. Just win.”

But it’s not that easy. First, the Mystics will have to stop hurting themselves with turnovers and various inconsistencies on defense and offense.

The first half of some games, the Mystics are notorious for starting games off slow not on the right track. Beard said, “First halves, we have got to find a way to turn the switch on. Unfortunately, we come out with the switch off (just about) every single game.”

Offensively, the Mystics are last in the league in scoring with a little over 70 points per game average. Defensively, the Mystics are fifth in the league, allowing 74.5 points per game. There are times when the defense has been questioned. But consistency is what they’ll have to work toward in order to win games and go back to the playoffs.

Second, head coach Tree Rollins is still looking for a stable, consistent lineup to put out on the court every game. But he knows the big three in Taj McWilliams-Franklin, Monique Currie and Alana Beard have to bring the pain every night in order for the Mystics to stand a chance. Beard leads the team in scoring with 19.5 a game, McWilliams-Franklin is second with 12.9 a game and Currie is third with 12.7 a game.

But just like anybody else in this world, they have letdowns and bad days. Unfortunately, those times cost the team heavily. Will the Mystics learn from the heartbreak in 2007 and not be doomed to repeat it?

The key to earning that elusive playoff spot for the Mystics according to McWilliams-Franklin is, “We just got to win games. That’s the bottom line. It’s not a secret formula. You just got to win games, gut it out. Everybody has a mindset that their going to do what it takes to win games. It’s not what looks good on the stat sheet. Some stuff you do, you’re never going to see on the stat sheet. Buckle down, gut it out and just do whatever we need to do to win.”

Obviously, the Mystics would not care to rehash 2007. But if they stay consistent and handle business at the optimum times, they will win games. By winning games, the Verizon Center will be rocking again in mid-September for the WNBA playoffs first round.