Coming out of halftime, Elena Delle Donne was still shooting 100 percent for the season. She could still claim to have never missed a shot at the Entertainment and Sports Arena.
The Washington Mystics star’s season debut aligned with the first WNBA game in the team’s new home arena. What synergy that turned out to be — the Mystics held an afternoon block party for fans to celebrate christening the ESA, then Delle Donne and company kept the good times rolling inside.
Delle Donne sank her first seven shots and finished with 18 points in 22 minutes as the Mystics ran away from the Atlanta Dream 96-75 Saturday night for their first win of the season.
Ariel Atkins led all scorers with 21 points, Emma Meesseman came off the bench to provide 14 and Kristi Toliver scored 10. All 10 Mystics who played scored, combining to shoot 56.7% from the floor.
In a rematch of last year’s WNBA semifinals, the Mystics (1-1) had the benefit of catching the Dream (1-2) on the second day of a back-to-back. Atlanta had a messy game with 13 turnovers and a few bad offensive fouls.
“I thought we set the tone defensively in the first half,” Mystics coach Mike Thibault said. “We made shots tough for them. Obviously they played last night but we tried to take their legs from them with our pressure and our transition back at them.”
Delle Donne missed the season opener a week prior with soreness in her left knee; the Mystics lost that game to the Connecticut Sun. Delle Donne originally injured her knee during the 2018 playoffs and said she “kept re-hyperextending” during training camp and preseason, so she wore a custom knee brace for Saturday’s game that stabilizes it while giving her her normal range of motion.
“I feel comfortable in it, I feel a lot more confident in it, so if it’s going to give me that peace of mind then I’ll stay with it as long as I need to,” she said.
Delle Donne and Toliver got Washington going by teaming up for the first six points of the game, including a Toliver steal in Atlanta’s end that became an easy layup. The Mystics finished the first quarter with a 26-16 lead, with Delle Donne putting up 10 early points.
But the most important stretch of the game came in the second quarter, when a group of second-teamers extended the Mystics’ lead to as many as 23 points while Delle Donne, Toliver and LaToya Sanders rested up on the sideline. Tianna Hawkins hit two 3-pointers and Meesseman scored a quick six.
Delle Donne scored 16 of her 18 points in the first half thanks to 7-for-7 shooting from the floor.
Atkins nailed three straight 3-point attempts early in the second half to keep the ball rolling, and although Delle Donne’s hot shooting streak finally ended a few minutes into the quarter, her teammates had plenty of juice remaining to stay comfortably ahead.
Myisha Hines-Allen, last year’s second-round draft pick, posted six points, two blocks and a team-high eight rebounds off the bench. She and Atkins, the Mystics’ first-round pick from 2018, have impressed Thibault so far in their sophomore WNBA campaigns.
“And I’ll throw Shatori (Walker-Kimbrough) into that group too, because they’re our youngest ones and they have stepped up,” Thibault said. “One of the things in the offseason, as I said, was that we need to find some players who can take pressure off our veterans and so far they’ve done a really good job.”
The Dream finally put a dent into their deficit with a 16-1 run in the middle of the fourth, but it was not nearly enough to flip the inevitable result.
Toliver said after the Connecticut loss, having a week off between games was beneficial, feeling like “a little extended training camp.”
“We knew that we were gonna play a tough team in Atlanta,” she said. “We didn’t have our best effort and didn’t have everyone in our home opener against Connecticut … We were able to play with one another more, play more 5-on-5, just familiarize ourselves with one another. And it certainly showed today.”
• Adam Zielonka can be reached at azielonka@washingtontimes.com.
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