Michaela Onyenwere has been trying to elevate to star status ever since she earned the WNBA Rookie of the Year award in 2021.
She averaged 8.6 points per game for the New York Liberty that year, shining brighter than everyone else in her draft class, despite five players being selected No. 6 overall.
But the next season, her minutes per game dropped from 22.2 to 13.7, and her scoring average fell to 4.7 points per game. In 2023, she perked back up to 23.8 minutes and 8.9 points per game for the Phoenix
Mercury, but she still wasn’t showing a ton of improvement over what she accomplished as a rookie. She spent 2024 and 2025 with the Chicago Sky, with her minutes and scoring dipping again.
But now it’s 2026, and things are going much better for Onyenwere. She’s beginning to live up to the potential she flashed as a rookie, and she may yet become a star.
The soon-to-be 27-year-old is the senior-most player on the youngest team in the league in the Washington Mystics, and she’s averaging a career-high 10.1 points on a career-best 41.7 percent shooting from 3, with a career-high 1.4 makes per contest. Her effective field goal percentage of 54.4 percent is 6.2 percentage points higher than her previous best, which she achieved as a rookie.
She’s also seeing more time on the court than ever before at 26.3 minutes per game and has started in all 21 of her outings, indicating just how big of role she’s playing for the Mystics.
It’s okay that Onyenwere hasn’t had the typical career of a WNBA Rookie of the Year
Most WNBA Rookie of the Year winners have gone on to become superstars.
However, even Onyenwere’s rookie production suggested a superstar trajectory was unlikely. Her scoring average is the second-lowest of the WNBA’s 28 Rookie of the Year winners; only the Chicago Sky’s Armintie Herrington’s 7.9 points in 2007 was lower. And Onyenwere played the second-fewest minutes per game; only the Atlanta Dream’s Angel McCoughtry (21.6 in 2009) played fewer.
So, Onyenwere didn’t have an All-Star level season as a rookie, like many Rookies of the Year do. But, based on what she accomplished, it appeared she had a bright WNBA future ahead of her.
That bright future, like futures of many members of the 2021 WNBA Draft class, had been slow to materialize.
It’s truly unfortunate that the No. 1 draft pick from 2021, Charli Collier, who was selected by the Dallas Wings, only lasted two years in the league. The Wings’ No. 2 pick, Awak Kuier, is finally beginning to reach her potential.
There’s so much pressure on top picks; we have to be understanding when it doesn’t pan out for one of them. The same sense of grace should apply to the Rookie of the Year-winning Onyenwere.
And that’s why it’s so good to see her now living up to expectations and rising above that pressure.
In becoming essential to the Mystics, Onyenwere has shown off her star qualities
Onyenwere has all the tools to become an All-Star.
She is hard to stop when driving to the basket and has no problem being physical in the paint. Her 3-point shot improved in her two years in Chicago, and it’s taken another leap this year; she’s now 10th in the W in efficiency. Then there’s the intangibles—she always makes the hustle plays.
It truly feels like she has arrived as a borderline star and like she has the potential to get even better. As a Mystics fan, I’ve wanted the ball in her hands.
She missed the first four games of the season with a knee injury, debuting on May 24 with six points. She showed the first signs of having a breakout season in the next game, scoring 14 points on 3-for-7 from downtown. She later had her best stretch of the season so far, scoring 17-plus points in four-straight games from June 8 to June 17. She capped that run with 22 points on 4-for-4 from distance.
She was good for 11 points in Washington’s next game, but then had outings of five, two and four points. She was due for another big game.
Such a performance came in the next contest, during the Mystics’ four-overtime odyssey against the Portland Fire on June 28. She went for a career-high 30 points on 6-for-9 from long range to help Washington pull out the thrilling win.
Since then, she’s had a few more low-scoring games, as well as games of 15 and 12 points. Her low-scoring performances, as well as her season-long scoring average, don’t paint the true picture of how valuable she’s been to the Mystics. She’s not forcing her offense, which is why the outputs are sometimes low. She knows Sonia Citron, Kiki Iriafen and Shakira Austin need to take the most shots. But the eye test tells a story of a player who is a dangerous fourth option.
And don’t discount what she has meant as a leader of the team. The young Mystics players know they can rely on her to be composed under pressure and bail them out in crunch time.
Mic and the Mystics seem like the perfect match
After such a promising rookie year, Onyenwere may have expected to call New York home for a lot longer. She was involved in the community there, including by helping renovate a basketball court in Manhattan. Expect that same love of community to translate to DC.
Onyenwere is the second-highest paid player on the Mystics at $700,000 and is signed through 2027, though her contract is unprotected next year. She’s in her prime, and is a valuable asset.
You can tell from the Mystics’ TikToks that she is having a ton of fun with her teammates, and the team is right where they expected to be: in playoff position.
On Monday night, they beat the Golden State Valkyries at one of the toughest places to play: Ballhalla. With that win, they snapped Golden State’s nine-game winning streak. They’ve now beaten two of the top three teams in the league, the Valks and the Minnesota Lynx, on the road.
Maybe this is the beginning of something special for Washington, and maybe Onyenwere will be a big part of it for years to come. She’s certainly looking like she’s going to have a long WNBA career and one as a major contributor, as opposed to being toward the end of a rotation.
