Kelsey Mitchell was drafted to the Indiana Fever in 2018. She left Ohio State as the Big Ten conference’s all-time leading scorer and the NCAA leader in career made threes, records that stood until a certain future teammate showed up. In the WNBA, Mitchell's scoring numbers hovered in the same place year after year, to little attention, the points usually in vain. The Fever’s longest-tenured player might be a veteran, but the wisdom doesn’t come from lots of big-game experience.
The WNBA sends eight of 13 teams to the playoffs; until this year, it sent eight of 12. It feels mathematically impossible that a player could make a playoff debut in her seventh season and only first win a playoff game in her eighth, but then, the Fever have been impossibly bad. “I’ve had five coaches in eight years. I’ve been on the worst-record teams here,” Mitchell said Thursday, celebrating her second playoff victory and first series clincher, Indiana’s 87-85 nailbiter upset of the Atlanta Dream.
However low the odds of a series win seemed when this series began, they seemed even lower earlier in the year, when half the Fever rotation began to make their home on the injury report. Caitlin Clark went down first. Sophie Cunningham’s knee gave out. The backup point guard and backup backup point guard suffered season-ending injuries in the same game. Aliyah Boston and Natasha Howard held down the frontcourt, but the guard group around Mitchell was, once again, looking just too thin.
What this Fever team did have was speed, and a paragon of it in Mitchell. In the second half of the season, her scoring has kept the Fever offense alive. She’ll head to Las Vegas for the semifinals as a finalist, deservedly, for MVP. Players of her ilk—the “good stats, bad team” types—get painted as ballhog chuckers, but that would miss the best parts of Mitchell’s game. Even without the ball in her hands, she can break down a defense; she’s constantly moving with precision and finding ways to finish a play. She finished Game 3 with 24 points and six made threes, looking perfectly at ease in the track meet. Her teammates won the game with hustle plays down the stretch, but Mitchell’s first half set up the gritty finish. Even as the underdog on the road at the end of a hellish year, she showed she was still determined to make the Dream work.
Mitchell was right in the middle of Indiana’s bizarre go-ahead sequence, even if she didn’t log the bucket or the assist. She recovered an almost-turnover on a pocket pass to Boston, flipped the ball back out to Odyssey Sims, and made enough Dream defenders nervous that Sims could lob it to a wide-open Boston at the rim. The Dream had their chances to take the game back, seven seconds and a timeout to burn. But Atlanta botched successive inbound attempts. Inbounder Rhyne Howard’s frustrating basketball instincts dull her talent, and she could only get away with one bad late-game decision before Lexie Hull made her pay.
“It’s one thing to say ‘stay ready so you don’t have to get ready.’ It’s another thing to do it,” Fever head coach Stephanie White said postgame, praising the players who took on more responsibility as the injuries hit. That’s wisdom Kelsey Mitchell has gained from big-game experience: Stay in shape, keep moving, and be ready when opportunity comes your way.
