How rookie Sonia Citron has burst onto the scene as a Mystics cornerstone and WNBA All-Star

In the second row on the bench, though, player development coach Clinton Crouch stayed seated. He and Citron had worked on 3-pointers from that spot that morning, and according to Crouch, Citron had hit 16 or 17 in a row.

So when Citron’s shot went in, Crouch didn’t see it. His head was bowed in prayer.

“Once I heard the crowd erupt, I knew it was good,” Crouch told The Next on July 6. “But I had to go back to watch the film to actually see the shot go in.”

“I didn’t have to pray,” Sutton countered on Thursday. “I knew it was going in.”

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Farther down the Mystics’ bench, point guard Jade Melbourne made sure her teammates stayed on the sideline as the shot fell. But then the Wings called timeout, and Melbourne’s guardrails were off. She was the first one to spring onto the court, holding up three fingers on each hand.

Citron’s shot ended up being the game-winner, and she finished with a career-high 27 points on 9-for-13 shooting and 11 rebounds for her first WNBA double-double.

“I was mad at myself because I thought that I could have ended it [in] regulation with my missed free throw,” Citron told reporters postgame, referring to a miss with 15.7 seconds left that would’ve given the Mystics a 4-point lead. “So just kind of happy that I got that one, [that] I ended it. I didn’t want to go into another overtime.”

Citron has been changing games all season for the Mystics, who have exceeded expectations at 11-11 in large part because of two All-Star rookies in Citron and Kiki Iriafen. They are the first Mystics rookies to be named All-Stars since Chamique Holdsclaw in 1999.

“Our rookies give us superpowers,” veteran guard Brittney Sykes told reporters on Thursday.

Citron ranks second on the team with 14.1 points per game, and she is also contributing 5.0 rebounds, 2.0 assists and 1.0 steals in a team-high 33.5 minutes per game. She is shooting 45.0% from the field and 36.5% from 3-point range, is taking on heavy defensive responsibilities, and leads the Mystics with 2.3 win shares.

“I feel like we’re just continuing to peel back layers of her game that we’re like, ‘Oh, wow, you can do that, too,’” Melbourne told The Next on Thursday. “So it’s super exciting. It’s so good watching her continue to progress. And I think the sky’s the limit for her. If this is what she’s doing in Year 1, it’s going to be pretty exciting what she can do … next year and then five years down the track.”

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Citron’s game has never been flashy, and she steadily climbed up WNBA draft boards in college at Notre Dame. A November 2024 mock draft had her as the 12th overall pick, but in the weeks before the draft, she was projected to go no lower than fourth.

“I’ve been a fan of hers ever since she went to Notre Dame, ever since she committed,” Las Vegas Aces guard and Notre Dame alumna Jackie Young told The Next on Thursday. “… I’ve always thought that she was super special, super talented.

“Her game kind of just flies under the radar. … When [draft experts] had her, like, late in the first round, second round, I’m like, ‘There’s no way. She’s going top three.’ I’ve always said that.”

Young ended up being right, as Citron went third overall, one pick ahead of Iriafen. Despite the high selection, Citron entered the WNBA with no expectations for herself. She said on July 6 that if someone had told her in April that she’d be an All-Star this season, she would’ve asked, “What kind of prank is that?” Her mentality has been simple: Play hard, be a good teammate and good things will happen.

Meanwhile, the Mystics had high expectations for her, but they didn’t expect her to do everything she’s done right away. She scored in double figures in the first 14 games of her career, the second-longest streak in franchise history, and is one of the frontrunners for WNBA Rookie of the Year.

“You could see the talent. You could see the good coaching that they had gotten in college,” Mystics head coach Sydney Johnson told reporters on July 6 about both Citron and Iriafen. “You could see that the future was bright, but you just didn’t know it was going to happen so quickly. … I just couldn’t have predicted it.”

But there were signs early on that Citron wasn’t a typical rookie.

In her first workout, Crouch remembers Citron struggled to do a drill perfectly and didn’t want to move on until she executed it.

“I knew in that moment that she has a chance to be really special,” Crouch said, “because she’s not satisfied with things just being OK. She wants to master it.”

Citron also impressed her coaches and teammates with her shooting in preseason practices. On May 16, the day of the Mystics’ season opener, Austin told The Next, “Coach would literally be like, ‘Y’all realize Soni hasn’t missed a shot all day?’ and it would be like an hour and a half [into practice]. And we’re like, ‘Soni, what the hell?’ And it’s been every day.”

Even Citron’s self-proclaimed “welcome to the league” moment, in a preseason game against the Atlanta Dream, showed that she was different. While trying to stay with Dream guard Allisha Gray, Citron ran full-speed into a screen from 6’9 Dream center Brittney Griner. She landed splayed out on her back like a starfish.

“She popped right back up with a smile on her face,” Crouch said. “And two possessions later, she scored. … There’s an inner toughness that you just can’t teach, and … she absolutely has it.”

The lesson Citron took from that was also telling. Instead of yelling at a teammate for not calling out Griner’s screen, Citron later thanked Griner for teaching her that she always needed to look out for screens.

“I think I’ll remember that [play] forever,” Citron said on a Bleacher Report segment with WNBA legend Candace Parker on July 2. “… Definitely the hardest screen I ever got hit by, but … I check my back now. So I would have rather learned it before the season started than now.”

Citron has shown a similar ability to learn from mistakes throughout the season. When she has had a rare down game, she has usually responded the next game. For example, after she had six turnovers in her fifth career game on May 25 — more than she’d had in her first four games combined — she had zero two days later. And after her streak of double-figure scoring ended on June 24 with a 3-for-13 outing against the Minnesota Lynx, she rebounded with 21 points on 7-for-13 shooting on June 26 against the Aces.

Though she is steadily climbing up opponents’ scouting reports, Citron also increased her scoring, rebounding, assists and steals in June compared with May.

“She’s so aware of what needs to get better, and that’s the reason why it gets better,” Crouch said.

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Behind the scenes, Citron has been working tirelessly all season to improve, even with her heavy workload in games. Multiple teammates said she is in the gym before and after shootarounds and practices. She also enjoys watching film and does it often, and she is diligent with her recovery in the training room.

On non-game days, Citron and Crouch generally do a “daily vitamin,” which is a short workout that focuses on small things Citron needs to fine-tune. Some drills are the same day after day, like shooting from eight to 12 feet and then stepping out to the 3-point line. But Crouch also mixes things up to keep challenging her and prepare her for what different opponents throw at her defensively.

“She makes me a better coach,” Crouch said, “because I have to make certain I come prepared, because whatever I put in front of her, she’s going to figure it out. And … the biggest separator for her is she’s able to install it in a game in real time, and it doesn’t take two, three weeks. If we work on something on a Monday [and] we play on Tuesday, she’s going to try it in the game, which to me is phenomenal. And that’s the hardest part for a coach to teach. Either players are able to do it or they’re not.”

That routine helps Citron stay confident, regardless of what happens in a game. She knows she’s put in the work, and she knows she’ll see the same shots fall in practice the next day.

It has also helped separate Citron from other rookies — and even veterans — from Day 1. In mid-May, Johnson told reporters about a conversation he’d had with Shelley Patterson, who is the Mystics’ head of domestic scouting and has been in the WNBA since 1999. Patterson said that players can improve extremely quickly if they approach their development the right way. It takes some players five or six professional seasons to figure that out, she continued, but Citron had gotten there already.

What stands out about Citron’s offensive game to those around her is how she doesn’t force shots. Instead, she reacts to what’s in front of her and has a knack for rescuing broken plays with the right cut or pass.

She is also unflappable when she misses and keeps shooting when she’s open. For example, when she shot just 2-for-10 from the field on Thursday against the Aces, she barely reacted to her misses. The most emotion she showed was in the fourth quarter, after she made her first field goal of the game: She pressed her palms together and looked up at the ceiling as she ran back on defense.

It helps that Citron is a true three-level scorer, which allows her to look elsewhere if one type of shot isn’t falling. So far this season, 26% of her shots are less than 5 feet from the rim, 33% are longer 2-pointers and 42% are 3-pointers. And she has steadily improved at handling the WNBA’s physicality and getting open despite being grabbed and held.

“Everybody’s trying to top-lock her, deny her, make her speed up on the floor, but I think she’s doing a really good job,” Sutton told The Next. “She looks like a vet out there handling all the pressure and all the hand checks that people are giving her, all the jersey grabbing. … She’s still able to score.”

In late June, Citron scored more than 20 points in three out of four games, a streak that included the win over Dallas. She also had two double-doubles with points and rebounds. Sykes has called her “slithery” for her ability to evade boxouts and grab rebounds in traffic.

Citron has also been slithery defensively, sticking with players through multiple screens and teaming up with Sykes to guard opponents’ top two perimeter players. At 6’1, Citron uses her length, mobility and relentlessness to pressure the ball in a Mystics system that emphasizes making opponents uncomfortable.

“She’s a big guard with length, and she has a knack for … knowing how to poke at the ball and just irritate the ball-handler,” Sykes told The Next on June 22. “She did it to me a couple times in practice.”

So far this season, Citron has drawn 12 offensive fouls and committed just one herself. And she has fouled shooters 23 times while getting fouled on her own shots 25 times.

Citron has always loved to play defense, to the point that Johnson said in mid-June that he’d never heard her talk about her game without mentioning defense.

“[Defense is] fun, and I know I can get a lot better at it, which is even more fun to think about,” Citron told The Next pregame on June 22. “… It’s something that I’ve always took pride in, something that I’ve always wanted to be good at.”

That mindset has helped her adjust to a Mystics system that is extremely different from Notre Dame’s. Citron told WNBA legend Lisa Leslie on Leslie’s podcast, “Between the Lines,” that some things the Mystics ask her to do are things she was told never to do in Notre Dame’s defense.

Citron, who mostly plays on the wing for the Mystics, has also had to adjust on every possession to guarding different types of players. On one possession, she’ll guard a 3-point shooter; then she’ll guard a slasher.

“Sonia truly sees herself as a two-way player, and it’s not good enough for her to just score points and … make some passes,” Johnson said postgame on June 22. “She really wants to be a two-way player and a true defender, and she is. It just starts with her desire, her pursuit.”

“She’s always asking questions of how she can do this better, or be more disruptive, or do the scheme in a better way, or be a better help for a teammate in a different scenario,” Mystics assistant coach and defensive coordinator Jessie Miller told The Next on July 6. “And she really listens, asks questions and then tries to apply [it] to the best of her ability every single time, possession after possession after possession.”

Citron has also had the luxury of learning from Sykes, a four-time WNBA All-Defensive team selection. Sykes has taught Citron “tricks of the trade” that often come with experience, like how to get around off-ball screens more easily or how to defend a particular move from a specific player.

Much of Citron’s success defensively so far has come while facing various teams and players for the first time. That makes the Mystics especially optimistic about how good she can be as she learns players’ tendencies and can anticipate more of what they’ll do.

But already, Citron is an impact player on both ends, an All-Star and an obvious centerpiece for the Mystics for years to come. Coaches and players around the league have insisted she doesn’t play like a rookie, and Aces head coach Becky Hammon even compared her to WNBA MVP candidate Napheesa Collier for her ability to play at her own pace. Citron’s supporters include two players she idolized when she was younger, Young and New York Liberty guard Sabrina Ionescu.

“She’s one of my favorite players out of this rookie class, someone that I watched in college and saw a lot of myself in,” Ionescu told reporters on May 30. “… She’s playing like, I feel like, a seasoned vet.”

“Kiki and Citron have been huge,” former Mystics and current Liberty guard Natasha Cloud added that night. “… I’ve never seen rookies play as well, as solid, this early in the season.”

“[Citron] doesn’t have any rookie qualities at all that I can see,” Dream head coach Karl Smesko told reporters on June 15.

The best way to describe Citron, then, might be as a rookie in name only after her seamless adjustment to the WNBA. Instead of making rookie mistakes, she’s been a rook on the Mystics’ chess board — one of the most valuable pieces to keep around for what it can do both offensively and defensively.

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Monumental Sports and Entertainment, the group that owns the Washington Mystics, holds a minority stake in The Next. The Next’s editorial operations are entirely independent of Monumental and all other business partners.

The Next’s Natalie Heavren contributed reporting for this story.