WASHINGTON — If the big stage was supposed to spook either the Washington Mystics or the Connecticut Sun, neither team gave any indication of bad nerves in the early moments of Sunday’s Game 1 of the best-of-five W.N.B.A. finals.
The Mystics, an offensive efficiency machine this season, and the Sun shot north of 60 percent in the first half, and kept hitting big shots throughout before the Mystics pulled away with a 95-86 win. Neither defense could do much to stop its opponent, flummoxing their coaches but putting on a show for everyone else.
“I suspect both coaches will be meeting with their teams tomorrow, and telling them a lot of the same things,” Mystics Coach Mike Thibault said.
Game 2 will be Tuesday night in Washington, but there is not much any coach can tell a team about guarding the two-time W.N.B.A. most valuable player Elena Delle Donne, who logged a 22-point, 10-rebound performance.
“Elena did what she does: 22, 10 and 5,” Thibault said. “And we had a lot of great contributions. But Ariel Atkins was huge today, from making that first 3. She looked like the Ariel of last year.”
Atkins’s emergence in 2018 helped the Mystics reach the finals despite a hobbled Delle Donne playing through a bone bruise. This year, the 5-foot-8 guard had scored only 18 points, total, in her team’s four-game series win over the Las Vegas Aces in the semifinals. She finished with 21 on Sunday, scoring those points on seven shots.
Atkins struck early, hitting a 3 for the first points of the afternoon, and had 8 points before the first media timeout.
The Sun countered with a run of their own, with the team’s vocal leader, Courtney Williams, sinking her second of six 3s, then finding Jasmine Thomas darting toward the rim for a layup to cut Washington’s lead to 18-17.
But the Mystics, playing with a three-bigs lineup of 6-foot-5 Delle Donne, 6-foot-4 Emma Meesseman and 6-foot-2 LaToya Sanders, countered with a 12-0 run to end the first quarter up, 30-17.
Both teams held each other scoreless for the first three minutes of the second half before the Mystics dropped in a pair of 3-pointers and went on an 8-2 run. The Sun climbed back to within 78-74 with six minutes left. The Mystics countered by feeding Delle Donne, who scored consecutive baskets, the second an absurd series of twist and turns around, over and through Alyssa Thomas, the Sun never getting as close again.
“Alyssa Thomas is an elite defender, and when she bodies up on 99 percent of the people in the league and they’ve picked up their dribble, she usually gets them stopped,” Suns Coach Curt Miller said. “But we all know that E.D.D.’s step-through in that last movement to the basket where she leans in and can create space and get her shot off — she’s the only person in the world that does that.”
The Sun believed there was still plenty to change in the loss, most notably getting forward-center Jonquel Jones more involved in the offense. Jones, the third-leading vote-getter for the M.V.P. Award is one of the most effective players on the floor, shooting the ball well from everywhere and, at 6-foot-6, causing defensive matchup problems no one can solve. The Mystics seemed to on Sunday, containing her to eight shots.
“We talked about going back to that, trying to establish her early in the second half, at least getting her touches,” Miller said of Jones. “But we need those shots up.”
It will be a team effort to do so. Williams said she plans “to hype her up, remind her she’s the best player on the floor.”
Despite the loss, Williams, who finished with a game-high 26 points, didn’t sound worried.
“To be honest, I felt like I could do whatever I wanted to do,” Williams said. “I felt like I was getting to all the spots I wanted to get to. I felt pretty comfortable. We’ve just got to win the next game.”
