INDIANAPOLIS \u2014 Saturday was a 40-minute exchange of firepower between the Indiana Fever and the Dallas Wings.<\/p>\n
Both teams offer high-powered offensive machines, anchored by two of the league\u2019s biggest stars in Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers. In the season opener at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, the Wings came away with a 107-104 win over the Fever.<\/p>\n
In front of a sell-out crowd, the teams changed leads 11 times, but it was mainly the Fever attempting to regain the advantage over the more efficient Wings. Guard Arike Ogunbowale led the Wings with 22 points while Bueckers and Odyssey Sims added 20 apiece. As a team, Dallas shot 52 percent from 3-point range (12 of 23) and outscored the Fever 25-12 in transition.<\/p>\n
Clark had a shot to tie the game with seven seconds left as the Fever trailed by three. She shot-faked from deep, sending Bueckers flying, but her wide-open look rimmed out. Clark finished with 20 points, seven assists and five rebounds in her official return to the WNBA after missing most of last season with various injuries. Indiana\u2019s Kelsey Mitchell led all scorers with 30 points, and Aliyah Boston added 23.<\/p>\n
The first round of the WNBA\u2019s newest blockbuster series belongs to the Wings.<\/p>\n
\u2018Caitlin Clark Effect\u2019 shows up in bursts<\/p>\n
She missed the butterflies. That\u2019s what Clark said before Saturday\u2019s game. The nervous churn in her gut that nevertheless tells her she\u2019s ready to play. When the Fever star couldn\u2019t do anything but watch through all her injury issues in 2025, there was too much calm where the storm should\u2019ve been.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s just like a different juice inside of your body when you\u2019re putting on your uniform and you\u2019re mentally locked in to go play a basketball game,\u201d Clark said. \u201cObviously, I was excited for my teammates last year. One-hundred percent. I was their biggest fan. But it\u2019s not the same.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nor was she, at least for the first half of Saturday\u2019s action. Clark followed a rousing welcome during pregame intros \u2014 it evoked the United Center crowd drowning out Michael Jordan\u2019s name during his Chicago Bulls\u2019 heyday \u2014 with a choppy first half. No 3-pointers. Two offensive fouls on obvious push-offs, the second a matter of total frustration with chest-to-chest defense. Shaky ballhandling. As time ran out before the break, Clark pounded the ball to the floor in frustration and voiced some sort of grievance to her head coach, Stephanie White.<\/p>\n
There will still be questions about how close to 100 percent health she is. \u201cWe wouldn\u2019t have played her 30 minutes if she wasn\u2019t OK,\u201d White said. At one point late in the fourth quarter, with the game very much in the balance, Clark had almost no burst to sprint back on defense and deter an easy Wings\u2019 bucket. Her multiple in-game visits to the locker room were cast by Indiana as much ado about not that much. \u201cJust getting my back adjusted,\u201d Clark said. \u201cIt gets out of line pretty quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Said White: \u201cThis is going to be an ongoing thing. Not just her. We\u2019ve had multiple players who have gone back. We don\u2019t have the blue tent. But they\u2019re going to go back and get adjusted and make sure the body is working.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the end, Clark didn\u2019t hit a 3 in the last frame. She couldn\u2019t get the one-on-one stop against Odyssey Sims with 35 seconds left, a score that gave Dallas a crucial five-point edge. Her clean look at a potential game-tying bomb with roughly six seconds left rimmed out. Mitchell, not Clark, was the Fever\u2019s option on the final shot at the buzzer. Instead, one of the most explosive shooters in the history of the game was a decoy.<\/p>\n
\u201cStarted off a little slow, just the anxiety of the first game, trying to work through that,\u201d Clark said. \u201cBut overall felt good, felt fast out there. Felt I was literally a couple buckets away from putting together a really good game and helping us win.\u201d<\/p>\n
Simply having Clark available again for WNBA games is a victory on so many levels in the league\u2019s 30th anniversary season. Clark\u2019s final line (20 points on 7-of-18 shooting, seven assists, five turnovers) and the final score made for a bit of an anticlimax. \u201cA lot to be proud of,\u201d she said, \u201cand a lot to learn from, too.\u201d \u2014 Brian Hamilton<\/p>\n
WNBA\u2019s freedom of movement emphasis<\/p>\n
The WNBA is emphasizing freedom of movement this season. The impact already appears significant through the preseason and a few regular-season games.<\/p>\n
More than 50 total player fouls were called in Saturday\u2019s game in Indianapolis \u2014 28 on the Wings and 25 on the Fever.<\/p>\n
\u201cLook, like I told (our players), like I told Alanna Smith as we were standing on the sideline having a conversation, this is what we want,\u201d White said. \u201cWe need to overcorrect, so to speak, so that we have freedom of movement. So it\u2019s a free-flowing offense. In all of our offseason, we have asked officials to call everything. The challenge and the question sometimes is: Is it consistent? So that\u2019d be the next growth phase and growth area. But this is what we need to clean up, some of the stuff we saw last year.\u201d<\/p>\n
Physicality in the WNBA has come under heavy scrutiny over the past few years with players and coaches across the league calling for changes. In a recent interview with NPR, Lynx forward Napheesa Collier said the physicality in the WNBA made it not fun to watch or play.<\/p>\n
This offseason, the league assembled a committee to evaluate potential changes, and the early result has been a heavy-handed whistle from officials. Atlanta Dream owner Renee Montgomery shared her opinion on social media, saying \u201cfreedom of movement is going to be a game-changer,\u201d clarifying in a follow-up post that it wasn\u2019t a positive assessment.<\/p>\n
For current players, officiating changes come with a steep learning curve.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can see they\u2019re calling a little different,\u201d Ogunbowale said. \u201cWe saw that in the preseason game, and I guess we just have to adapt because that\u2019s going to happen. Unless we\u2019re just going to be fouling out, a lot of us has five (fouls). We (Ogunbowale and Sims) both had five fouls. It\u2019s been a long time since I had three fouls in the first half and almost fouling out. I guess show our hands and see what we can do. But yeah, it\u2019s going to be a long season.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sims added: \u201cWe gotta adjust.\u201d \u2014 Annie Costabile<\/p>\n
High scoring, but where was the defense?<\/p>\n
The pregame message from White to her team was simple.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can\u2019t just go out and try to outscore Dallas; they can score, too,\u201d White said.<\/p>\n
Attentive, aggressive defense on every possession was what she preached when discussing what it would take from the Fever to get a win in their first game of the season. She was right.<\/p>\n
The Wings didn\u2019t play great defense, either. Ogunbowale joked postgame, explaining it\u2019s not fun to be in a game like Saturday\u2019s with both teams exchanging buckets \u201cbecause we\u2019d rather get stops.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, the Wings didn\u2019t require a better defensive performance with their offense operating as efficiently as it did. They shot 59.1 percent from the field and outscored the Fever 36-21 from 3. Wings coach Jose Fernandez\u2019s one offensive complaint was a judgment of his own performance, saying he had to find a way to get some of his bench \u2014 specifically Maddy Siegrist and Aziaha James \u2014 more touches. On the defensive end, Fernandez said he wanted to see his team take away the downhill actions.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have to do a much better job of keeping the ball in front of us,\u201d Fernandez said.<\/p>\n
Four of the Wings\u2019 five starters scored in double figures, with Ogunbowale leading the way.<\/p>\n
The Fever, meanwhile, had no problem getting to the rim. Led by Boston, they outscored the Wings 62-44 in the paint but shot just 29.2 percent from three. Those struggles from deep, specifically Clark\u2019s, are not going to hinder them all season. They were fourth in the league last year in 3-point percentage, shooting at a 34.6 percent clip as a team. Saturday was an off outing, but to White\u2019s point, winning in a shootout, specifically when outperformed from deep, is going to require more on the defensive end.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor us, we have to be on and we have to be attentive, and we have to be aware of the entire possession defensively,\u201d White said pregame. \u201cIt\u2019s going to take a lot out of us.\u201d \u2014 Annie Costabile<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"INDIANAPOLIS \u2014 Saturday was a 40-minute exchange of firepower between the Indiana Fever and the Dallas Wings. Both…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":633683,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[2834,2839,99,434],"class_list":["post-633682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-dallas-wings","tag-indiana-fever","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=633682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633682\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/633683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=633682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=633682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=633682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}