LAS VEGAS — It was a cruelly fitting twist of fate. In a winner-take-all semifinal against the Las Vegas Aces, Indiana Fever guard Kelsey Mitchell crumpled to the court with extreme lower-body cramping that left her feeling numb and paralyzed. Indiana’s star and top scorer was helped off the court in the third quarter and taken to a local hospital.
But as they’ve done so many times this season, the Fever played on, pushing through the anguish of watching another teammate be sidelined.
They did it when Caitlin Clark went down with what ended up being a season-ending groin injury in mid-July. They did it again and again as the injuries mounted and four other Indiana players were lost for the season to injuries. The Fever persevered and reinvented themselves through hardship contracts and an ever-changing lineup of players.
“Unfortunately,” Fever coach Stephanie White said Tuesday, “we have a lot of experience in rallying around teammates.”
Through it all, there were two constants: fight and belief. The depleted Fever astonished outsiders with their trip to the WNBA semifinals. And they stunned the basketball world again in Game 5, when they rallied and forced overtime even after losing Mitchell and Aliyah Boston, the team’s dependable All-Star center, who fouled out.
But they didn’t surprise themselves.
“That’s what Steph said in the huddle, ‘We’re built for this moment, we’ve been here before,'” guard Lexie Hull said. “It’s just so unlucky, so crazy, that that had to happen tonight.”
Moral victories don’t really exist in sports. But the lasting impression from the Fever’s playoff run — where they took the Aces, the closest thing the WNBA has seen to a dynasty this decade, to the brink — ranks as one of the most impressive losing efforts in recent sports history.
“They just would not go away,” Aces coach Becky Hammon said. “They went through a lot of adversity this year, and for Steph to keep everybody on board … hats off to them. I thought they did an unbelievable job all the way around, their roster, their coaching staff. They’ve just gas-pedaled the whole time.”
“This group is all heart, man,” said White postgame, using the towel draped around her neck to wipe away tears. “It’s just really hard to put into words. … I’ve experienced some special teams in this league, in this organization. But collectively, this group has been at the top.”
Despite the injuries and pain of Tuesday’s elimination, the Fever view the 2025 season as an unequivocal success.
“We weren’t even supposed to be here,” said guard Odyssey Sims, who joined the team on a hardship contract in August and led it in scoring in Game 5 with 27 points. “We finished out strong. It wasn’t the outcome we wanted, but we still got to hold our heads high.”
IN MAY, THE idea that the Fever would be within minutes of a Finals appearance would not have been shocking. Last winter, the team announced that White would return for her second stint as Fever head coach after she served as an assistant for their 2012 championship squad and led them back to the Finals in 2015. Then a productive free agency positioned Indiana as a championship contender for the first time since Tamika Catchings’ retirement after the 2016 season.
But if White were told back then that this is how the season would go, as she has previously joked, she would have probably responded “no stinking way.”
“I’ve aged about five years,” White quipped this week.
DeWanna Bonner, the Fever’s prized free agency acquisition, was waived nine games into the campaign. White dealt with a death in her family that required her to miss two games in June. Most significantly, Clark was in and out of the lineup with soft tissue ailments, playing in no more than five consecutive games this season before suffering a groin injury just before the All-Star break.
The hits went well beyond Clark. Point guards Aari McDonald and Sydney Colson were lost for the season in the same game Aug. 7 at Phoenix, the former breaking a bone in her foot and the latter tearing an ACL. Earlier that day, Clark suffered a bone bruise in an ankle during a workout. Less than two weeks later, guard Sophie Cunningham went down with a MCL tear, and forward Chloe Bibby suffered her own knee injury five days later. Forward Damiris Dantas never even appeared in the playoffs due to a concussion.
Others in the Fever’s orbit weren’t spared. The team’s player development coach ruptured an Achilles on Sept. 1. The next day, one of the club’s PR staffers broke her elbow and wrist. Even celebrated entertainer Red Panda fell during her halftime performance of the Fever-Minnesota Lynx Commissioner’s Cup final and suffered a serious wrist injury.
“I’ve been a part of this league for 25 years,” White said, “and I’ve never seen all of this stuff happen in one season to one team.”
Players were in and out of the lineup as newcomers were brought in midyear — the team carried 11 players on opening day and rostered 18 by the season’s end — meaning White and her coaching staff constantly had to scale back the playbook and shift identities based on personnel. Hardship addition Aerial Powers remembers spending the charter ahead of her first game going over plays with new teammate Shey Peddy, who had joined the team right before her.
But every time Indiana lost someone, the Fever staff approached it as an opportunity to problem solve, asking how it could put the team in positions to succeed.
Mitchell was tasked with handling the ball, as a scorer and often as a playmaker, more than ever. To start the season, Boston had taken on a role as an offensive hub, and once injuries piled up, it became even more necessary to play through her. The Fever lost outside shooters in Cunningham and Clark, and bringing in players such as Sims and Powers required them to attack by applying more rim pressure. Playing consistent, aggressive yet disciplined defense came at a higher premium when more scoring options went down.
White set the tone by instilling unwavering belief in the team, telling her players that even under less-than-ideal circumstances, they always had more to give.
“It would be so easy to give up and say, ‘We’re just going to take this year, we’re going to have a building year, we’re going to get better and set ourselves up for a good season next year,'” Hull said Tuesday. “She came at us and challenged us to continue to fight. Not every coach can motivate a group to do that.”
The players responded by embracing new roles and on-court tweaks. Players and coaches raved about the team’s chemistry and selflessness. “We over me” and “standard over feelings” became their internal rallying cries — inspired in part by White’s work with mental skills trainer and performance coach Ben Newman. But the latter was also the message Colson shared in an early team meeting: Feelings are fleeting, and there’s a lot of ups and downs in a season — competing to a standard must come above all else.
It was a lesson that had more pertinence this summer than anyone could have anticipated, perhaps in no moment more so than when the Fever lost Cunningham midgame against the Connecticut Sun. Despite trailing by 21, they rallied to win in overtime, an effort that brought White to tears in the locker room and her postgame news conference.
“Some other teams that might not be as strong culturally or be as resilient could have folded multiple times,” White said last month, “and this group hasn’t.”
AT 19-18 TOWARD the end of August, the Fever were at risk of missing the playoffs entirely. But they won five of their final seven regular-season games, clinching their postseason berth a week before the playoffs started.
“There would have been so many teams that would have folded with all the s— that we’ve been through,” White said in her locker room address after that game. “And we just kept getting better and we kept getting tougher and we kept becoming more resilient and we kept figuring this out.
“We’ve had like seven new teams throughout the course of the season. …. And we ain’t done yet. And in the playoffs ain’t nobody going to want to see us. We continue to focus on competing to the standard, preparing to the standard and then we scare the hell out of this league,” she said as her players clapped and cheered.
When the Fever fell behind 1-0 in their first-round series against the Atlanta Dream, the end again looked near. But the Fever survived two elimination games to secure the franchise’s first playoff series win since 2015. In the semifinals, they took Game 1 on the road against the Aces, staved off elimination a third time in Game 4 and came within minutes of making it back to the Finals.
“There’s no circumstance that we went through on or off the floor — because we had some off the floor stuff too — that they blinked, that they held their heads down, that they didn’t just stand tall and face head on,” White said. “You don’t see a lot of that nowadays.”
Another mantra the Fever lived by this season was coined by Mitchell after Clark got hurt: “We all we got, we all we need.” There was no moment where they embraced that sentiment more than Game 5.
After Mitchell left the game — she said Wednesday she is expected to make a full recovery from rhabdomyolysis, a condition where muscle cells break down and release a protein into the blood stream — the Aces built a nine-point lead behind some brilliant play from A’ja Wilson, seemingly taking control of the contest. But the Fever kept sinking shots and hung around and, as the fourth quarter progressed, made one last push to tie the score with less than a minute left in regulation.
When Boston fouled out with 26.4 seconds left in regulation, the Aces went ahead two, it felt like the final straw — but the Fever had yet another answer, as Sims tied the score and Indiana secured a defensive stop to force overtime.
When the Fever retook the floor for overtime, they were without Clark, of course, but also Mitchell and Boston. Natasha Howard was the only player who was in the team’s starting five on opening day. Brianna Turner had seen minimal minutes until the tail end of the season. Sims and Peddy weren’t even picked up until mid-August.
And yet: “All five, everyone on the bench, playing or not, we believed we were going to win that game,” Hull said. “We believe in each other and in ourselves.”
Even after the Aces used a flurry of 3-pointers to take a commanding lead in overtime, they didn’t pull away for good until the final minute. Asked whether there was a point where White felt her group had no more left to give and she got everything possible out of them, the coach confidently answered, “No.”
“We continued to give,” she said. “I think [the Aces] just made really tough plays, championship plays, and that was it.”
The Fever players gathered together for one last huddle on the court after the final buzzer sounded and the Michelob ULTRA Arena crowd roared over its Aces’ return to the Finals.
“Arm and arm, all of us together, we can look at each other and be proud of each other,” Hull said. “It was a moment of love for sure.”
THE FEVER LEARNED quickly to adapt amid such a roller-coaster season. That approach will be required just as much this offseason, not just for Indiana but the entire WNBA.
The vast majority of the league’s players are free agents ahead of the arrival of a new collective bargaining agreement. Clark and Boston are still on their rookie deals, and Hull is a restricted free agent, but Indiana has little in its control beyond that. The organization will undoubtedly look to re-sign Mitchell but then must determine which other players it will choose to surround its young core.
Asked after Game 5 how soon they would start thinking about next year, White and Boston answered simultaneously, “tomorrow.”
The Fever will look toward 2026 when they can reincorporate Clark into the fold and likely run back a young team that now has experience going deep in the playoffs. It can continue to build off the culture it established this year.
“When you can go through and grow through these types of experiences,” White said in the first round, “it lays a foundation for championship culture and championship mindset. And that’s our ultimate goal.”
“A championship is always on my mind,” Boston said Tuesday. “We got a taste of it, Game 5 semifinals. And now we want the real thing.”