NEW YORK—Elena Delle Donne made no promises when asked before the game if she would be playing at 100 percent.
“We’ll see,” she said with a half-shrug and a laugh, smiling because she was about to do the thing she didn’t always love, clearly does now, and does better than virtually anyone on the planet: play basketball.
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It’s been a haphazard kind of season for Delle Donne, who came east in search of a fairy tale but the movie keeps getting paused—for a pair of injuries, ankle and thumb, not to mention the array of maladies that befell Tayler Hill, Natasha Cloud, even international obligations that separated Emma Meesseman from her teammates by an ocean.
“Every season is different,” Delle Donne said following the game, sitting at her locker. “But this season is especially different.”
Even so, the Mystics have been a 13-8 team with Delle Donne, even after a 74-66 loss to the Liberty on Friday night at Madison Square Garden. That’s a 21-win pace in WNBA terms, an elite team for all the stops and starts.
And for Delle Donne, it’s been a vintage season—Player Efficiency Rating at her career norms (which, it must be noted, is among the best of any player in league history), shooting more accurately than ever, even eleventh in the league in defensive points per possession, per Synergy.
The gap between New York and Washington on Friday appeared to come down to something simple: the Liberty have won seven in a row because Bill Laimbeer, with a full team, has managed to figure out who they are. For Mike Thibault, that process starts now, with the end of the regular season just over a week away.
“I feel like we’re still introducing ourselves a little bit,” Thibault told reporters, standing in front of the visitors’ locker room, following the game. “Elena’s only been back for a couple days. We’re missing Cloud. They’ve had a good rhythm, and it probably started when we played them here and they made the lineup change.”
A full array of players is a luxury Thibault can only dream of, but notably, despite her 34 minutes on the floor, Delle Donne took only 10 shots.
“It’s been a different season, going from playing the four most of the season, then Emma comes back and going to the three, then getting injured, and now coming out and getting the three role. So it’s going to take a few games, which is why I’m hurrying back, to try and get back into the flow of things in time for the playoffs.
Even so, Delle Donne provided ample reminders of just why Washington was so desperate to acquire her this past offseason, an offense unto herself. She closed the ground so quickly from the far corner to the hoop on a baseline drive, sank jumpers with ease over whoever the Liberty threw her way in double teams.
But that three-quarter court outlet pass to Meesseman, which produced two of the only six Washington points in the fourth quarter, reflected another reason she came to the Mystics: to be surrounded by offensive weapons that have led her to play within the flow of an offense, rather than shoulder the full burden of rescuing her team late in games as she did so often in Chicago.
“I just think it’s the next stage in my development, knowing that to win a championship, you need every person in this room,” Delle Donne said. “Trusting that they can make that big moment. And you’ve got to put them in that moment before the playoff moments come.”
And so Friday night, as Delle Donne pointed out, was about more than just playoff positioning—even in a league where the difference between seeds four and five are enormous, the former getting a bye, the latter facing a dangerous team, whether it is Dallas, Seattle, or a Chicago Sky team that was busy beating the Connecticut Sun on Friday night to keep its playoff hopes alive.
“Obviously we want to get a good seed, but we just want to get it right by the playoffs, get to our right spots and peak at the moment.”
Delle Donne knows more than a little about doing this already, leading 15-19 Chicago team in 2014 into the WNBA Finals. Between Delle Donne and her team’s floor leader, Kristi Toliver of the 2016 WNBA champions in Los Angeles, there’s plenty of knowhow to go along with enough shooting talent to destroy the season-long plans of any opponent in the win-or-go-home games that lay ahead.
But after a game that Toliver described as feeling like “the beginning of the beginning”, no one on the Mystics seemed quite sure if the superstar talent on hand could figure it all out in time.
“I don’t know,” Thibault said, equal parts amused and irritated at the prospect. “We’ll find out! I don’t know what’s realistic in this league right now.” He laughed, and pointed out he and the Mystics have less than two weeks to find out.