Hello, hoopheads! I hope everyone had as nice of a Friday night as Bestie and I did while seeing Florence + the Machine exactly one seat to the right of where we’ll be taking in 11 Liberty home games this summer. Now, however, it’s time for the WNBA preview series to press on as the season opener looms just 13 days away. If you’d like to catch up, you can find the first three installments at these links: Las Vegas Aces, Phoenix Mercury, Minnesota Lynx. As always, please feel free to leave any questions or comments below, and even more free to like, subscribe, or tell the ball knowers in your life about The Post Presence. Without further ado, it’s time to talk about the Indiana Fever.
What happened last season?
Indiana was pegged as a title favorite by the oddsmakers, media and fans entering Caitlin Clark’s second and Aliyah Boston’s third WNBA season, but never really got the chance to prove whether those expectations were fair with Clark missing three quarters of the season due to injury. On top of losing their franchise cornerstone, the Fever were famously beset by numerous other injuries throughout the season, and also parted ways with one of their higher-profile free-agent signings, DeWanna Bonner, after just nine games. Still, the quartet of Boston, Kelsey Mitchell, Natasha Howard and Lexie Hull each played in all 44 regular-season games and carried Indiana to its first winning season since 2015, as well as its first WNBA semifinal appearance since then. The Fever came tantalizingly close to upsetting the Aces in those semifinals, taking the decisive Game 5 to overtime before finally running out of steam. That loss notably featured one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen on a basketball court when Kelsey Mitchell was briefly immobilized due to rhabdomyolysis, a potentially fatal condition which is generally seen under extreme circumstances such as ultramarathons and basic training (not on basketball courts).
What’s the roster going to look like?
Most importantly, Clark appears to be fully recovered and poised to return to putting up unprecedented stat lines on a near-nightly basis. There are a million different permutations of Clark’s numbers that make her one of a kind, and I might well get through all of them by the fall, but let’s just start with the fact that her average of 8.5 assists per game is nearly two helpers higher than anyone else in league history. Courtney Vandersloot is next at 6.6, and she’s the only other player above 6.0. The logo 3-pointers and 30-burgers get most of the attention, but the return of Clark’s playmaking is going to make the entire Fever roster better. Returning stalwarts Boston, Mitchell and Hull all stand to benefit, although the fourth 44-game player in 2025, Howard, has moved on. Sophie Cunningham will also spend a second season alongside her besties Clark and Hull in Indiana. Today will be the last time I mention her if I can avoid it.
Indiana was widely expected to be a top free-agent destination this offseason, but in the end the vast majority of the league’s best players opted for continuity once the issue of fair compensation was taken care of. The Fever still made one major move in free agency, signing veteran forward Monique Billings, although she ultimately looks more like a replacement for the departing Howard than an addition to what the Fever were working with in 2025. That said, I think Billings will be a great fit next to Boston in the frontcourt, and she was excellent this winter in Unrivaled, averaging 14.2 points and 12.4 rebounds (second in the league) as Mitchell’s teammate with Hive. Another new Fever player with an established bond with one of her new teammates is first-round draft pick Raven Johnson, who was Boston’s teammate during South Carolina’s 2021-22 national championship season (Johnson also might have met Clark before, or so I’ve heard).
What’s the Marvel Snap deck?
As one of the company’s iconic villains and the driving force behind the Avengers movies, Thanos is a fairly ubiquitous Marvel character, if not necessarily a beloved one. You’ve surely seen memes of his big purple self even if you have no interest in superheroes or poker-like games based on them. The “mad titan” occupies a similar space in Marvel Snap, having been one of the most powerful cards to build an archetype around in the game’s early days and more recently positioned to enter every new player’s card collection early in their Snap experience. Similarly, whether you like them or not, you’re gonna see a lot of the Fever if you tune into the WNBA this season, because all 44 of their regular-season games will be on national TV. You might also notice that this Thanos deck, which I’ve actually been playing a decent amount of lately, features “tres leches” in the form of Valentina, Mockingbird and Aurora. The latter, like Logo Leche Clark, has the unique ability to add points to almost any other card on her side of the board.
Don’t hate me for this, Fever fans. I swear I said it with love!
What’s the expectation?
Assuming Clark is indeed back at full strength and stays that way throughout the season, I would probably rank the Fever as something like the fourth-strongest contender for the WNBA title, just ahead of a healthy Lynx team. That makes my expectations for the Fever lower than the oddsmakers would have you believe theirs are — Indiana is just behind Las Vegas with the third-best title odds at (the gambling app I keep on my phone for moments when I think it’s useful context, but which I don’t feel compelled to advertise by name). That said, oddsmakers have been known to play on public perception, and the public is always going to be extremely high on Clark’s team. I’m not down on the Fever, I just think the Aces and at least two other teams look better on paper. Come back tomorrow and Monday to learn their identities, because they’re the next two teams up.