Mystics hold the Lynx to a season low, and lose anyway 78-76

The Minnesota Lynx arrived at CareFirst Arena on Wednesday night at 14-4, carrying one of the most efficient offenses in the league and the confidence that comes with it. They left having scored 78 points, the fewest they have managed in any game this season, but they left with a win.

That is the contradiction Washington keeps running into. The Mystics have now held Minnesota below 80 twice in the span of five days. The Lynx have failed to clear that number only four times all year, and the Mystics are responsible for half of those nights.

Washington held Minnesota to 38 percent shooting and 8-of-30 from the 3-point line, the same blueprint it has leaned on all season. Six times this year the Mystics have kept an opponent under 80. The number has stopped looking like a fluke and started looking like a plan.

The problem is that a plan and a result are not the same thing, and Wednesday was the reminder. Washington was built to win games in the 70s. This time it lost one, 78-76, on a night when the offense actually held up its end. Sonia Citron scored 28 on 9-of-14 shooting, including 4-of-5 from beyond the arc, and it still was not enough, because the Mystics handed the ball back 18 times against Minnesota's 13. A defense this good cannot afford that kind of carelessness. The distance between the team Washington is and the team it wants to be lives in those extra giveaways.

A signature win that got away

This is the honest shape of the Mystics' season. They are 8-8, quietly excellent at one end of the floor and quietly undermined at the other. They out-defend opponents who had more talent, then surrender the edge in loose stretches. Against the league's weaker offenses, that flaw is survivable. Against a 14-4 Minnesota team that knows exactly what it wants in the final three minutes, it is the line between a statement victory and a loss that lingers precisely because it was so close.

What makes it a story rather than a box score is the repetition. Teams become what they do over and over, and Washington has now turned the league's most dangerous offense into a grind multiple times. Scoring gets harder in September, and the teams that can take points off the board are the ones that survive deep into the bracket. The Mystics have that survival trait. They are still missing the closer who turns these nights into wins.

There is also the matter of where these games are happening. Washington is 6-4 on the road and 2-4 at home, a strange split for a defense-first team that should, in theory, feed off its own building. The crowd at CareFirst has watched this group play some of its best basketball and walk away with nothing to show for it.

They will get another chance to settle it. Washington and Minnesota meet a third time on August 21, back at CareFirst, the deciding game of a series the Mystics have made far closer than the standings suggest.