Is there a WNBA coach who has enjoyed a more surprising season than Sydney Johnson?
It certainly seemed that just about everyone had written off the Washington Mystics before the team played a single game of basketball this year, and it honestly wasn't too difficult to understand why. The Mystics are the youngest team in the league, with a relatively new coach, and there was no reason to expect they'd play as hard as they have this season.
Maybe some of that youthful energy infused the team with a "if they're counting us out, we'll show them they're wrong" kind of energy. It's been clear all season the Mystics are having a lot of fun together, and that the team's energy is fully cohesive and on fire; Washington has managed to make losing and winning look equally great, and they've surprised a whole bunch of us while doing so. They're also heading to the playoffs, and I am pretty sure anyone who says they saw that coming at the beginning of this season would be engaging in some very creative historical rewriting.
At the center of it all is Sydney Johnson.
The Mystics are enjoying their first winning season in four years, which is a short time in the regular world but eons in the WNBA. Johnson has taken a roster of young upshots and developed them into players who command respect; Shakira Austin is still only 26 and enjoying career-high performances, and the team saw both Sonia Citron and Kiki Iriafen named to the U.S. national team for the 2026 FIBA World Cup, where they won gold medals.
Coach of the Year is one of the more unpredictable season-ending awards. Natalie Nakase's win last year wasn't a huge surprise — like the Mystics this season, the Golden State Valkyries were mostly written off last season. Nakase steadfastly refused to accept that vision for her team, and the Valkyries ended their debut year in the first round of playoffs. That is a genuinely unheard of feat, the kind of WNBA mythology that will persist and circulate and inspire for years to come.
It's also true that the best team in the league doesn't always have the person named Coach of the Year at its helm. The Minnesota Lynx have been topping the rankings all season, and in a lot of ways Cheryl Reeve has certainly outcoached many, if not all, of her colleagues this season. She deserves Coach of the Year, but she's not the only one.
That leads us back to Johnson, the guy who knew how to take advantage of the silence surrounding the beginning of the season for the Mystics and to let his team just have fun with it. Whatever he's cooking in Washington is clearly working, and for that, he's a worthy candidate for one of the WNBA's most important accolades.
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