ATLANTA — Inside an overly warm, dimly lit, standing-room-only space usually reserved for Zamboni parking, Stephanie White offered a three-syllable summary of how the Indiana Fever have slogged through chaos to become a viable championship threat.
“We’ve grown up,” White said Sunday evening.
The latest case in point: A 95-91 overtime win over the Atlanta Dream at State Farm Arena in which both red-hot clubs stumbled badly and regularly. The Fever, with their all-world backcourt and an offense on a record efficiency pace, in fact leaned on young frontcourt talent and an ability to finish defensively, earning a critical victory as they pursue home-court advantage in the WNBA playoffs. It was Indiana’s fourth straight win, boosting their record to 23-12. Atlanta slipped to 21-13.
Indiana salvaged a 2-2 split of its season series with Atlanta, which started the day a half-game behind the Fever in the overall standings. White considered this entire five-games-in-seven-days trip a rehearsal for playoff basketball — in particular the quick prep and adjustments required in it — and Sunday sure looked a lot like the postseason played early.
“You can’t let one slip because that’s the difference between hosting two games in the first round or going on the road,” said Fever guard Caitlin Clark, who finished with 26 points and nine assists. “This was a big one. This was a really important one for us to get, and that’s kind of the story of this whole road trip — this is the last matchup we have with a lot of these teams, and these teams are really good, and possible teams we’ll see in the playoffs.”
Timpson continues revelatory growth
In February, the Fever staff visited Unrivaled and checked in with Makayla “K.K.” Timpson, their promising 6-foot-2 forward who had very much looked like a rookie in her rookie year. Come to Indianapolis early, they told Timpson. There’s a lot of work to do.
Timpson’s growth trajectory has now altered the trajectory of Indiana’s season. On Sunday, in her fifth start of the season, she posted a career-high 20 points. She scored six points in the overtime session alone, one off a lob and one off a pseudo-lob — catching a Kelsey Mitchell airball and banking it in for a bucket. “Just throw it up,” Timpson said afterwards, “and I’ll go get it.”
Still, it’s her defensive capabilities that have altered the calculus for White and the coaching staff. Timpson began the game matched up with Rhyne Howard, one of the guards headed to the FIBA World Cup with Team USA next month. After that, she shifted onto bigs and then quickly closed up space when the Fever deployed a fourth-quarter zone that flummoxed the Dream.
“This was not something we would have thrown at her the first third of the season,” White said. “She’d be in regular switches, guarding post players. But the more and more comfortable she’s got, the more and more responsibility we’ve given her, and the more and more she stepped up and met those expectations. It allows us to do a lot of different things.”
Gray goes cold
Allisha Gray was the best player on the floor in the first half, scoring 17 points at all levels and earning some face-to-face time with Angel Reese, who made a beeline off the Dream bench to hype up her more reticent teammate. And when Gray hit a stepback 3 midway through the fourth quarter, it put her at 32 points while at least temporarily quelling the Fever’s increasing momentum.
Gray then finished the game with … 32 points. From the 6:14 mark of the last frame through overtime, the four-time All-Star vanished. She missed a potential go-ahead jumper out of a timeout with less than a minute to play in regulation and then went 0-for-4 with a turnover in the overtime period.
“I just feel like we came up short tonight,” a clearly frustrated Gray said after the game.
That said, the Dream were without starting point guard Jordin Canada, who missed the game with illness, and Gray wasn’t the only star to miss chances. On the final sequence of regulation, Howard missed a 3-pointer, and both Reese and Naz Hillmon missed putback attempts before the horn sounded.
“We just had to move on to the next play,” Dream coach Karl Smesko said. “There was supposed to be one screen in there, and we kind of forgot the screen, but then (Howard) took the shot and we told those two to really crash the boards. They both did exactly what we asked for. We got two looks that could’ve won it for us. They rolled out. Just kind of a bad break.”
Kelsey Mitchell: Shoes off, scoring streak on
This was not the smoothest effort for Mitchell, the WNBA’s second-leading scorer, or her footwear. In the first half, she spent an entire defensive possession retying a shoe that had fallen off while she ran back down the floor. (Somehow, the Fever got a stop anyway.) Then with a chance at the go-ahead score in the final seconds of regulation, Mitchell had the ball, planted to change directions and had her left shoe fall off yet again, forcing Indiana to call a timeout.
Mitchell slammed the wayward high-top to the floor after that. But with 13.5 seconds left in overtime, she finished a drive through traffic to create a five-point edge for the Fever — a bucket that also preserved her streak of 20-point games. It’s now at 19 in a row, one shy of the record of 20, held by Las Vegas Aces forward A’ja Wilson.
“Kelsey struggled from the floor in the first half and she found it in the second half,” White said. “That’s part of her growth, just knowing to stay with it, that it’s going to come.”
But, yes, one more suggestion from the coach.
“Triple-knot the shoes,” White said with a laugh.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Atlanta Dream, Indiana Fever, WNBA
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