INDIANAPOLIS — The Indiana Fever’s culture is getting tested early, veteran guard Kelsey Mitchell said Tuesday.
The Fever, the focus of a lot of preseason hype as potential championship contenders, are now sitting at 4-4 after a winless road trip to Golden State and Portland. Add constant defensive breakdowns in those games and a disagreement between Caitlin Clark and Stephanie White in a timeout during that Portland game getting overblown on social media, and the Fever have had their fair share of recent frustrations.
“I think our culture is being tested,” Mitchell said. “We’ve got to figure out if we’re truly intentional about who we say we want to be. Time will tell.”
The Fever coaches called a long meeting Monday to address those frustrations, whether it be offensive, defensive or otherwise. In the meeting, Sophie Cunningham said, they went through anything anyone possibly wanted to speak about in order to get back on the same page as a team.
“(It was about) just what everyone’s kind of feeling, where we need to be, what our identity is offensively, where we’re struggling defensively, where is the breakdown,” Cunningham said. “I think we were in there for like an hour and a half, almost two hours, and we peeled back all the layers. So I think everyone’s on a good page right now, and we’re ready to work.”
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The frustrations came to a head after a dismal 100-84 loss at Portland capped off that winless road trip. The Fever started on an 8-2 run over the first three minutes of the game, then didn’t make a field goal for the rest of the quarter as Portland went on a 27-7 run through the final seven minutes. The Fire then scored 37 points in the third, extending their lead to 25 points — an insurmountable deficit for the Fever.
That terrible loss, too, came just over a week after the Fever beat the Fire 90-73 at home.
“After Portland, I mean, that was just, that’s not it,” Cunningham said. “We can’t be playing like that. We’re too good. We needed that meeting, and I think everyone’s refreshed and ready to get going.”
And the team didn’t need to watch film together to know that something had to change. Players watched film on their own, Cunningham said, but they didn’t have their usual team film session.
“After this trip, and particularly after that game, the details of the Xs and Os weren’t going to help us move forward in the way that we needed,” White said.
That Portland loss was just a game, White said, that they needed to flush. She thought it was more productive to have that meeting, which was called by coaches before it turned into more of a player-led meeting, to see how everyone was doing and what they thought could be better.
“We want this to be a player-led team,” White said. “We want them to be empowered to take ownership, be empowered to have hard conversations, be empowered to uplift one another, be empowered to give up self for team, put the we over me.”
This is a team, too, that has largely shown that they have that interconnectedness to be great. They returned seven players — Clark, Mitchell, Cunningham, Aliyah Boston, Lexie Hull, Makayla Timpson, and Damiris Dantas — who experienced the chaos of six season-ending injuries and worked through it, as a team, to make it to overtime of a decisive game 5 of the WNBA semifinals against the eventual champion.
They’ve jumped through these mental and physical hurdles and have gone through the frustration of bad losses together before. They just need to figure out how to do it again.
Less than a quarter of the way through the season, there’s plenty of time for the Fever to right the ship. And Mitchell would rather these frustrations come now over later in the season, when they have the added pressure of fighting for playoff positioning.
“If you think everything is glitz and glamour, you’re mistaken,” Mitchell said. “I think that hard times make you or hard times can break you, and hopefully it won’t break us. I think that losing is important, you find out a lot about yourself, about where you need to be, where you’re missing the mark, and I think that I’m happy that it’s happening now. If there are frustrations, I’d rather it be now than later.”
Chloe Peterson is the Indiana Fever beat reporter for IndyStar. Reach her at chloe.peterson@indystar.com or follow her on X at @chloepeterson67. Get IndyStar’s Indiana Fever and Caitlin Clark coverage sent directly to your inbox with our Caitlin Clark Fever newsletter. Subscribe to IndyStar TV: Fever for in-depth analysis, behind-the-scenes coverage and more.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Inside the Indiana Fever team meeting during time when ‘culture is being tested’
Reporting by Chloe Peterson, Indianapolis Star / Indianapolis Star
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