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Second-year guard Jacy Sheldon, who was acquired from the Connecticut Sun on Aug. 7, had just one suitcase with her at first. And her car, with “pretty much [her] whole life in there,” was still in Connecticut.
“We’ll get that here at some point,” she told The Next on Wednesday.
As Clark and Sheldon experienced, midseason trades tend to cause chaos for players logistically. But both players have had an uncommonly smooth transition on the court.
“It just seems like — I don’t know, it’s odd — they could have easily started training camp with us,” Mystics head coach Sydney Johnson told reporters on Aug. 10, a few days after the trades. “I mean, that’s kind of how it feels to me in terms of the type of people they are, and certainly through their play.”
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The Mystics acquired Clark on Aug. 5 as part of a trade that sent leading scorer and assister Brittney Sykes to the Seattle Storm. Then they added Sheldon in a deal that sent reserve forward Aaliyah Edwards to the Sun.
For Clark, it’s her second stint with the Mystics after signing a two-year contract ahead of the 2021 season. She requested a trade out of Seattle this season after averaging 18.0 minutes per game, her fewest since her third WNBA season in 2014. When she heard she was going back to Washington, D.C., she was thrilled.
“I was grateful for the [Storm] organization for making something happen,” Clark said. “… For them to honor [my request] and get me somewhere that I’m familiar with, that they knew I would be happy being, I’m so appreciative of that. So it’s worked out great. I’m happy. I’m at peace.”
There’s a sense of comfort for Clark in returning to Washington, D.C., where she still has her go-to coffee shop, dog parks and nail salon. But inside the Mystics organization, much has changed since 2022. The head coach and general manager are new. The only current teammate Clark played with in 2022 was center/forward Shakira Austin. And the 2025 Mystics are over a full year younger, on average, than the 2022 version as the franchise rebuilds around young players.
Clark has changed, too. She won her third WNBA championship in 2023 while playing for the Las Vegas Aces. She adopted a second dog, Cecil, to join Sly, who was with her in Washington in 2022. She also believes she has matured and grown as a person over the past three years — in part from the heartbreak of losing her father, Duane, in September 2022.
“I think my empathy is growing even more, which says a lot because I’ve always been a love-first, empathetic person,” Clark said. “… And I think just the grace with myself. I’m such a perfectionist. I’m so hard on myself. I want to be great at everything that I do. And so I think just being able to show myself a little grace and just remind myself of how far I’ve come, and just to make sure that I’m still enjoying it and not putting so much pressure on myself that it takes away from the fun of showing up here every day. … And I think just growing in the security of who I am as a player as well.”
Though the 38-year-old Clark is likely in the twilight of her career, she has already had a big impact on the Mystics. She has led with her voice and her experience, and her teammates have embraced that. She is one of just two Mystics who are older than 26, and the rookies affectionately call her “Granny.”
“AC was one of the best vets I’ve had. She was pretty much the vet that I looked up to during my rookie season,” Austin told reporters on Sunday. “… We’re not looking for her to just come in and be a complete star player for us. We understand where she is in her career. But her impact doesn’t change.”
Austin said the team had never communicated more in huddles this season than on Aug. 10 against the Dallas Wings — Clark’s second game back. That was because Clark “just wanted to figure it out, no matter what the scoreboard [said], no matter what’s going on.”
Three days later, in a game against the Golden State Valkyries, Clark pulled starting point guard Sug Sutton aside. “You do really well running the team, but you also can get a bucket,” Clark said. Sutton finished the game with 15 points on 7-for-11 shooting and seven assists — arguably her best performance of the season.
“That’s probably just one thing out of 100 since she’s been here,” Sutton told The Next on Sunday. “But that just shows the type of leadership that she has. That just shows the type of person that she is. … And I think that’s boosted my confidence a lot in these last three games, honestly.”
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The Mystics are currently in 10th place, just a half-game out of the playoffs, and have five rookies on the roster (including forward Madison Scott, who is on a seven-day contract). Clark is embracing the chance to do more teaching with this group and help lay a foundation for future championship contention. “They help keep me young,” she joked.
“I think her experience is huge,” rookie guard Sonia Citron told reporters on Friday after the Mystics rallied for a win over the Indiana Fever. “… She just always finds the right things to say, I think, in moments where our team may be down or [we] just need someone to bring us together.”
Clark has also gotten a larger role on the court with the Mystics, which she’d hoped for when she asked out of Seattle. Her minutes are up slightly, to 20.4 per game, and she is averaging 6.4 points per game, up from 3.5 in Seattle. Her usage rate has also increased from a career-low 10.6% to 13.0%, which is near her career average.
In addition, Clark has long been an elite defender. Johnson noted her defensive impact even in her first game as a Mystic on Aug. 8.
“[We] see her making certain slides that we’ve worked really hard to get some of our younger players to do,” Johnson said on Wednesday. “And she’s doing it first game and then kind of quarterbacking, in a sense.”
Offensively, Clark led the WNBA in 3-point percentage in 2019 and 2020. But she shot just 29.1% with Seattle this season, and she came to the Mystics having not hit a three since July 6 — an 0-for-15 stretch.
Since rejoining the Mystics, she has shot 6-for-12 from three, bolstering a Mystics offense that makes and attempts the fewest threes per game in the WNBA. After she hit the only one she took in her first game back, she turned her palms upward and glanced toward the ceiling.
“It’s like, ‘Good, she still works,’” Clark said.
Clark made another 3-pointer against Dallas en route to nine points — her most since June 17. Two games later against Indiana, she had 11 points on 3-for-5 shooting from three and four rebounds. She stuffed the stat sheet even further on Sunday, with seven points (1-for-2 from three), seven rebounds and six assists in a win over the Los Angeles Sparks that was crucial for the Mystics’ playoff hopes.
“When we haven’t had [3-point shooting], it’s really kind of limited our offense,” Johnson said before Sunday’s game. “… So with AC, we want that to continue for as long as possible, because it just adds a versatility to our offense that we need.”
Sheldon is similarly expected to help the Mystics with her shooting ability and defense, and she and Clark are excited to play together. Clark called Sheldon “the ultimate competitor” and “a positive light,” while Sheldon said she was relieved not to play against Clark anymore because of Clark’s craftiness and IQ.
The Mystics are Sheldon’s third team in two WNBA seasons, but the trade brought her back to where she started. She met the Mystics in Dallas for their game against the Wings, the team that had drafted her fifth overall in 2024. She was then traded to the Sun in February before coming to the Mystics.
“I always hated to play against her, so to have her on our team is really cool,” point guard Jade Melbourne told The Next on Wednesday. “… It’s great playing with another ball-handler. So when you’re on the court with Jacy, it spreads it.”
Sheldon got the Mystics’ playbook the night of the trade, and she studied it throughout the three-hour flight from Connecticut to Dallas. She said she saw lots of similarities between the Sun’s and the Mystics’ principles, though some of the terminology and details are different.
In her Mystics debut, Sheldon had eight points and two rebounds in about 22 minutes off the bench. She got to the free-throw line five times, which is important for a Mystics team that lost Sykes’ 6.3 free-throw attempts per game.
“Any way I can fit in and help them win games, that’s what I’ll do,” Sheldon said on Wednesday.
“Having two new players has been amazing,” veteran center Stefanie Dolson told reporters after the Dallas game. “Their energy just lifted all of us up. And I think they just helped us on both the offensive and defensive end.”
Sheldon then had five points in nine minutes against Golden State on Wednesday before exiting with a sprained ankle. She will miss her third straight game on Tuesday — the first of two games this week against the Sun — and is considered day-to-day.
But the injury hasn’t dampened the Mystics’ excitement about Sheldon and her potential long-term.
“She is a really good processor,” general manager Jamila Wideman told reporters on Thursday. “And what I mean by that is she’s somebody that, within our offensive scheme, is able to make reads for herself off the pick-and-roll, but also just off of our cuts. … That ability to read is something that we prioritize.
“And the other thing I’ll say about Jacy is she’s a worker. Before she got here … I think she hadn’t touched a ball for all of six hours and was really anxious to know the next time she was going to be able to get in the gym. So … we’re lucky to have her.”
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Less than two weeks after the trade deadline, Clark and Sheldon are still managing the off-court challenges of moving hundreds or thousands of miles at a moment’s notice. But on the court, they look like people who have settled in, have unpacked and are ready for more.
“They pored into the playbook before we could even say go,” Johnson said on Wednesday about how much he can ask of them right now. “… They’re about their business. They’re hanging around trying to get extra shots up. … So it’s not about [not] overloading them. It’s more of giving them what they want because their energy and their focus and their professionalism [are] asking for it.”
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.
