From 1-8 to the WNBA playoffs: How Caitlin Clark, Fever overcame early growing pains

INDIANAPOLIS — Caitlin Clark raised her hands and applauded the sellout crowd of 17,274 at Gainbridge Fieldhouse on Sunday night. The Indiana Fever had just defeated the Dallas Wings 110-109, with Clark dropping a career-high 35 points and eight assists. The crowd showed no signs of let-up on an NFL Sunday, and Clark and her teammates took their time leaving their home court for what could be the final time this season.

Players signed small red-and-white basketballs and launched them into the stands for eager fans to take home. The arena DJ kept the party going, playing DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win” once the buzzer sounded and following it up with Kool & The Gang’s “Celebration.”

Indiana has had plenty to celebrate over the past few months.

With Clark living up to the hype that followed her from her legendary career at Iowa, a rejuvenated Fever franchise is back in the playoffs for the first time since 2016, the final year of the legendary Tamika Catchings’ career. Sunday’s result guaranteed Indiana its first .500 or better record since 2016 and clinched the No. 6 seed in the postseason, where its high-octane offense will look to knock off the 3-seed Connecticut Sun in a best-of-three, first-round WNBA playoff series.

Back in May, though, the playoff discussion seemed out of reach, the possibility of a semifinals berth almost unfathomable. The Fever desperately searched for an identity amid a 1-8 start. Clark, fellow former No. 1 pick Aliyah Boston and franchise stalwart Kelsey Mitchell looked like they were operating on different planes. All while the outside noise surged over what was going wrong in Indianapolis.

“It could have gone sideways real quick at 1-8,” Fever coach Christie Sides said last month. “The character of people that we have in that locker room, they just weren’t going to let that happen.”

With the benefit of time, especially the monthlong Olympic break, the Fever came together and discovered who they can be at their best: a team no one wants to face in the playoffs.

“I think that’s probably what I’m most proud of,” Clark said last week. “We start 1-8, and that really stinks. But nobody ever quit. We came in here every single day and continued to work. … We just weren’t executing. We weren’t really on the same page. We weren’t playing the same way that we are now. I’m proud of our group. We just continue to work and get better and be positive.”

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SITUATED IN THEIR film room, the Fever’s game goal board serves as a place where Sides lists the team’s keys to victory for each matchup. At the bottom of the board lies something else: a visual representation of their season results from May 14, their season opener, to the present.

Black W’s represent wins, red L’s losses. And the beginning of this series of letters has a lot of red.

Indiana’s competition to open 2024 featured a gauntlet of top-caliber WNBA teams. In their first four games, all losses, the Fever faced championship contenders in the Connecticut Sun and New York Liberty twice each, dropping their first two contests by a combined 57 points.

Including additional matchups versus the Seattle Storm (twice) and Las Vegas Aces, Indiana played its first 11 games in 20 days — by contrast, the Aces played six games in that span. By mid-June the Fever met New York and Connecticut for a third time, resulting in two more blowout losses.

Their 1-8 record in May was worse than their 3-6 start through nine games in 2023. ESPN Analytics said the Fever had the toughest schedule in the league prior to the Olympic break.

“From the competitor lens, I mean, awful, awful,” Boston told ESPN. “You never want to start a season the way that we did.”

With Clark bringing in a tsunami of attention from the college game to the WNBA, Indiana’s growing pains were observed and analyzed under a magnifying glass unlike any the sport had seen. Everyone had an opinion on whether Clark and the Fever were underachieving. Boston dealt with negative comments from fans amid a personal rocky start, ultimately deleting social media from her phone. Some onlookers called for Sides to be fired.

“[Those people] do not matter,” Indiana general manager Lin Dunn told ESPN. “That’s something that we had to learn with this team. All those people on social media, they’re not relevant. What matters is what the people around you, that you value, think and what you think. We had to make sure we blocked out the noise.

“I thought Christie did a good job of not worrying about whether ‘the people’ wanted her fired. All she had to know is that I didn’t pay any attention to ‘the people.'”

The narratives surrounding Clark took on a life of their own. Debate raged over whether her transition to the pros was a success: She showed moments of brilliance, but struggled with physicality, and at times the game moved too fast for her, leading to a litany of turnovers.

Clark’s competitive fire was on full display both when things were going right and when things weren’t. But if the chatter got to her, she didn’t show it.

“I think she really can’t hear because she’s really blocked out the noise from the outside world,” guard Erica Wheeler told ESPN. “To be that young, to have that weight on her shoulders, no matter what she does gets highlighted, whether it’s good or bad. … I tell her all the time, ‘You probably got bricks in your ears, you really don’t flinch when it comes to the outside noise.'”

“It could have gone sideways real quick at 1-8. The character of people that we have in that locker room, they just weren’t going to let that happen.”

Fever coach Christie Sides

Even as wins proved difficult to come by, Fever personnel asserted it would take time for the team to come together. Clark and Boston were still learning how to play alongside each other, as was Mitchell, who had barely played in training camp because of an ankle injury that she was still working her way back from.

The team maintained perspective on the difficulty of its early-season slate plus the cadence of games leaving minimal practice time. “There’s a sense of, this is helping us get better,” Clark said after the team dropped to 0-4. “And there’s going to be a time this season where it really shows that these four games we opened the season with, it’s going to pay off.”

Dunn remembered thinking in those early weeks if the Fever could get through that stretch, keep making steady improvement and make it to the Olympic break, they were going to surprise some people. The team might have been frustrated initially, but the players chose to fight instead of fold. “Your culture is the foundation of your program,” said Dunn, the coach of the Fever’s 2012 championship squad. “We have really good people that come from championship-caliber programs, really good people that understand it’s a process, then they can get you through that tough time. Poor culture, we would have never made it.”

Now when Sides looks at her game goal board, it gives her chills to see the wave of red give way to black, the losses give way to a steady stream of wins — from one in May to seven in June, big-time victories over New York and Minnesota in July and a 5-1 run in August.

“This is Year 3 of my [rebuild] plan,” Dunn said, “and we’re right where we need to be.”

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WITH CLARK MIKED up for Indiana’s Aug. 18 home game versus Seattle, TV cameras caught a conversation between her and Boston on the Fever bench. With her arm around Boston, Clark turned to her teammate and told her, “You’re going to be amazing because you are amazing.” Boston responded, “Thank you, you too!”

That interaction wasn’t a one-off. The exchange has been part of the pair’s pregame routine since the beginning of the season, according to Boston, well before their turnaround. Clark said those words to Boston before a game one day, and it stuck. “It’s actually pretty cute and pretty nice,” Boston said, “because it’s words of affirmation for both of us right before we head out on that court.”

The Boston-Clark connection on the floor has become a nightmare for opposing defenses to contain, with Clark assisting on 105 Boston baskets, tied for the most of any duo in the league. So, too, is the Mitchell-Clark pairing, with Clark assisting on 81 of Mitchell’s makes.

The synergy took time to develop, just as the Fever promised, but no stretch was as critical to the team coming together as the Olympic break.

Even as Indiana had started to win games toward the end of the first half, it couldn’t take the time to enjoy it, Sides said. “We were all just still, I don’t even know, stressed,” the coach said. “You couldn’t breathe with all the expectations of everyone on the outside.”

With just one Olympian (Kristy Wallace for Australia) in Paris over the break, 11 of the team’s 12 players had some time off before regrouping for what effectively was a mini training camp. As important as the basketball work was — especially to have real practice time — so too was the team bonding.

The coaching staff organized activities for the team before practice — a putting game, home run derby, minute-to-win-it competitions. They went to an obstacle course with rope swings and zip-lining and had a speaker meet just with the players to focus on team building.

“You don’t get into relationships, romantic or not romantic, without knowing the people,” Mitchell told ESPN. “To have a really good basketball team and a really good partnership, you have to know who you’re dealing with. As small as their grammar, hear the way they speak, being passionate about things and what they don’t like. I think it goes hand in hand when you’re trying to figure out how to get the next stop and get the next play.”

The Fever are a “goofy” team, Wheeler said, that likes to be light and have fun, but is still made up of competitors.

“We all just want to win,” guard Lexie Hull said, “and [learned we had to] put aside anything that would get in the way of that.”

The team that went 1-8 in May is a shell of the group that’s entering the postseason now, one that from June 1 to Sept. 10 boasted the third-best record in the league at 18-9. Indiana has coalesced around a big three and a fast style of play, with the Fever’s pace ranking second in the league since June. After the Olympics, Sides settled on a starting lineup featuring Hull, who provides a defensive presence on the perimeter and is shooting 63.2% from 3 in the second half.

Boston has adjusted her game from a post-up-centric style to thriving with Clark in the pick-and-roll, where she’s empowered to score or facilitate on the short roll. Clark said she and Mitchell, who’s shooting 50% from the field, 45% from 3 and a touch under 90% on free throws in the second half, now have an “unspoken communication.” Together they are arguably the most powerful offensive backcourt duo in the league: Mitchell ranks second in the league in scoring (23.4 PPG) and Clark third (23.1 PPG) since the Olympic break.

“That big three scoring trio … that’s why I tell our guards your greatness will be intertwined with each other,” Las Vegas Aces coach Becky Hammon told ESPN prior to the teams’ two last week in Indianapolis. “When you play with each other, I make your life easier, therefore you shoot better, you score more points, you shoot a better field goal percentage and vice versa, and it goes on down the line. And I think they’ve kind of found that happy place with each other.”

The Fever’s offensive efficiency in May was a paltry 96.6 points per 100 possessions, second worst in the WNBA. Ever since? Best in the league at 109.6. Their defense has a ways to go but has made strides since its flat start to the season.

“Time is huge with a young team,” Hammon said. “Chemistry and that stuff just doesn’t happen.”

The game has slowed for Clark, who said it was “almost overwhelming” at the beginning of the year to get trapped and blitzed so much off ball screens that she just wanted to get rid of the ball. Now, she’s “almost picking it apart in a way where I want to get blitzed,” she added, “that should offer us an advantage.”

Her film sessions with assistant coach Jessie Miller have shifted from showing her the basics of the different coverages she might see in games and how to make early reads, to the more intricate details, such as the next level of reads to make based on certain defensive rotations.

“She’s always just asking questions,” Miller told ESPN. “She wants to learn. She’s just this fierce competitor that always wants to win. So any kind of details you can give her to help her to be successful in the court, she just wants to learn and try to apply immediately, which is phenomenal. She’s just a fast learner, and she’s going to try her best to do whatever it takes that we need to win.”

Clark’s scoring has improved since May — she’s not just making more 3-pointers, but is also getting downhill and converting more. But her court vision and facilitating — where she has shattered a dizzying array of records — is where she has shined the most, a testament to the team’s surging chemistry. Of her 12 games with double-figure assists, all but two have come since the beginning of July. Her 38.0 points scored or assisted per game in 2024 marked the most in a season in league history.

“One thing about [Clark] is when things get hard, she’s not just going to quit,” Las Vegas Aces guard Kate Martin, Clark’s former Iowa teammate, told ESPN. “And she never did.”

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Caitlin Clark sets record for most assists in a season

Caitlin Clark sets a WNBA record for most assists in a season with 317.

THE FEVER WERE in striking distance. Late Friday against the two-time defending champion Aces, Indiana had cut a 13-point deficit to two with 1:48 to play, within reach of beating Las Vegas for the first time this season.

With A’ja Wilson switched onto her, Clark hoisted a deep 3 with 15 seconds left on the shot clock, and it bounced off the front of the rim. The Aces made her pay on the other end, as Jackie Young drove to the paint and kicked out to an open Kelsey Plum for a corner 3.

The Fever had the ball down three with less than 20 seconds on the clock, but Clark and Mitchell weren’t able to get open, and a 3-pointer from an open Boston rimmed out, ensuring a Las Vegas win.

Even amid an up-and-down season, the Aces remain the gold standard to Indiana. They’re the only team the Fever did not defeat in the 2024 regular season. And they represent what Indiana hopes to emulate with its collection of top draft picks.

The Aces (formerly San Antonio Stars) franchise drafted Plum, Wilson and Young with back-to-back-to-back No. 1 picks from 2017-2019, ultimately winning WNBA titles in 2022 and 2023. Championships are the goal for the Fever behind their two top picks in Boston (2023) and Clark (2024), plus a pair of No. 2 picks in Mitchell (2018) and NaLyssa Smith (2022).

Last week was a reminder that that long-term goal is very much a work in progress.

As the third-youngest team in the league and coming off a seven-year postseason drought, the Fever wanted to treat their two games in three days against the Aces as a playoff series. Las Vegas comfortably beat Indiana by 11 on Wednesday, “so right now we’re going home because we just lost two games,” Sides said.

The frustration Sides felt from her team squandering a prime opportunity — she lamented their 11-for-20 free throw shooting, in particular — existed alongside a flicker of encouragement.

They were right there.

“I think it should provide us some confidence,” Clark said. “Every single time we’ve played this team, we’ve gotten better and better and closer and closer. And to see how far we’ve come from where we first started … now I felt like we were really in this game. We convert a few more times and convert our free throws, hopefully we’re walking away with a win.”

“We’ve worked our asses off to get to where we are, just being consistent with their effort daily since we got here,” Sides said. “When we played Vegas early, we weren’t there, and they got us. But right now, like they’ve got to really believe that we are there with those guys, and I think they do.”

Indiana has tasted success against the upper echelon of teams, but knows the postseason is different, especially with this being the first go for not just Clark, but the rest of its starting five. The Sun’s collective 222 games of playoff experience stand in stark contrast to the Fever’s 19 combined postseason games.

The Fever will need to minimize lapses on both ends of the floor, especially at the beginning of halves. Their defense — their Achilles heel much of the season — has to be the best it has been all year. Indiana, especially Clark, can’t let any frustration get the better of the Fever if things aren’t going their way.

But for a team that dramatically turned things around after people had already counted them out, maybe the Fever aren’t done.

“I always thought this year with this group that we were a playoff team,” Dunn said. “The question for me now is, what can we do in the playoffs? Are we old enough, wise enough, tough enough, experienced enough to surprise some people?”