WASHINGTON — At a time when the WNBA has never been more popular, with room to grow, the Washington Mystics acknowledge they have catch-up work to do before they fully take part in that ascendancy.
But now franchise officials believe they have two people in place who will help the Mystics meet the moment, and, in the process, also help push the league further along. The Mystics formally introduced new general manager Jamila Wideman and new coach Sydney Johnson on Wednesday, saying they would focus on developing players off and on the court.
“This is a global city for what in the WNBA is a global game,” Wideman said. “If you look at the players who are coming into our league, if you look at the connectivity between our players born here in the U.S. with places around the world, you could not have a better place, a better market to embrace a game that has that range of diversity and reach, and I think that’s really where we’re focused on building.”
Wideman, 49, and Johnson, 50, were hired in December by Michael Winger, the president of Monumental Basketball, the umbrella organization that includes the Mystics, the NBA’s Washington Wizards and the NBA G League’s Capital City Go-Go. John Thompson III, Monumental Basketball’s senior vice president, also played a central role in the hiring process.
Wideman, a lawyer and former WNBA player, had spent the previous six years in the NBA, most recently working as a senior vice president of player development. Johnson spent the 2024 WNBA season as an assistant coach with the Chicago Sky.
The Mystics won the 2019 WNBA title but had fallen on hard times recently, finishing the 2024 season with the league’s fourth-worst record, 14-26. After the season, Winger fired Mystics general manager Mike Thibault and Mystics coach Eric Thibault.
“I think for the last handful of years, we have tried really hard to be competitive, sneak our way into the postseason and make some noise once we got there,” Winger said on Wednesday.
“It’s been a handful of years of not achieving competitive goals, and when you’re not achieving competitive goals, you’re probably not in the upper tier of that relevance push. You’re not one of the leading edges of the league. And we want to be a leading edge of the league. We want people to look at the Mystics and think to themselves, ‘Wow!’ We need to catch up … and I don’t think right now we are the team, or among the top three or four teams, that the rest of the league is trying to catch, and I want us to be one of those small handful of teams.”
Winger said he would be only “marginally” involved in the Mystics’ roster-building work, saying, “It’s Jamila’s roster.”
This upcoming @WNBA season is shaping up to be one to watch for the @WashMystics! 🏀💫
At today’s press conference, GM Jamila Wideman and HC Sydney Johnson joined Monumental Basketball President Michael Winger to share their bold vision for the team and the evolution of women’s… pic.twitter.com/x6pmCmdKzU
— Zach Leonsis (@ZacharyLeonsis) February 12, 2025
“At the end of the day,” Winger added, “you defer to the experts, and Jamila is the expert. She’ll come to Syd for counsel, to players on the ability for multiple players to play together. She’ll go to John on the same. She’ll come to me on the same. At the end of the day, all we need is for the experts to just follow their process, and if they follow their process and come to a conclusion, they’re going to have carte blanche to make that decision and then execute upon that decision.”
The hires of Wideman and Johnson cap an active 22 months within the uppermost tiers of Monumental Basketball.
In April 2023, Ted Leonsis, the principal owner and CEO of Monumental Sports & Entertainment, fired Wizards president and general manager Tommy Sheppard. One month later, Leonsis hired Winger to the newly created position of president of Monumental Basketball. Winger then hired Will Dawkins as the Wizards’ new GM, and Thompson was promoted to his role as senior vice president.
During the 2023-24 NBA season, Wizards coach Wes Unseld Jr. was fired, and he was later replaced permanently by interim coach Brian Keefe.
Wideman is an unconventional hire in the sense that she’s never worked in a team’s front office. Johnson had played on Princeton’s men’s basketball team when Thompson was an assistant coach there and worked as an assistant coach on Thompson’s coaching staff at Georgetown.
Wideman and Johnson said they have identical visions of how they want the Mystics to play: “fast” and “attack-oriented in terms of getting the ball down the court and putting pressure on defenses,” in Johnson’s words.
“We want to collaborate,” Johnson said later. “We want to put players first. We want to win games. But we don’t want to short-change the experience of players in doing so. All of those are deeply valued to us.”
Wideman and Johnson inherit a roster in which two key players, Brittney Sykes and Shakira Austin, missed extensive time because of injuries last year.
Asked to assess the Mystics’ roster as it stands now, Wideman said, “I don’t know necessarily that what we saw on the court last year is the end-all, be-all potential for the roster as currently constructed. But what I see coming in … is we’ve got a really interesting mix. We have incredible, elite veteran talent. We’ve got a core of youth that is really, really good — really, really promising. We’ve got some depth across the board at all positions.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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