It’s loud wherever the Indiana Fever are. Noise, both literal and figurative, and attention follows them wherever they go.
It doesn’t matter where in the country or outside of it they are, there’s an inevitability that just like any of the world’s most revered pop stars, droves of fans are going to follow.
Ever since 2024, the Fever coming to town as the road team has always meant a sellout crowd and a playoff-level environment. Ever since Caitlin Clark entered the league in the heralded 2024 draft class over two years ago, fans of her high-flying style of playing basketball in college for the University of Iowa have transferred over to the pro league where she now plays.
Two seasons after Clark’s introduction to the league and a season after she missed most of her sophomore season, the Fever have met the hype in 2026 in a much more meaningful way. They boast a historic offense, which as of this writing is rated at 115.1, the highest in the league and the highest since 2023’s Las Vegas Aces. The Aces ended the regular season with a 113 offensive rating and eventually made their way to win their second straight WNBA title.
But also, the Fever’s massive attention has led to controversies on and off the court that have created difficult situations for the Fever and other WNBA players and coaches across the league. This has included players getting death threats following a flagrant foul to Clark that was missed initially by the officials, in addition to a host of bad faith actors jumping into the WNBA space after Fever wing Sophie Cunningham made her beliefs about transgender athletes publicly known in an interview with ESPN.
These issues have even caused serious emotional distress for Fever themselves, with their head coach Stephanie White having a mic drop moment during a pregame press conference where she called for the hateful language toward the entire league and her team to stop.
A lot of the bad faith actors have limited knowledge of the league, its players and the game being played. This was revealed quite publicly when two protests on either side of the debate about transgender athletes were surveyed about the very league itself.
We interviewed both sides of the trans women in sports protests outside the Fever-Liberty game pic.twitter.com/prQthkCXnT
— Sportico (@Sportico) August 23, 2026
“We know we do not want to be used as a pawn,” Breanna Stewart said the morning before the New York Liberty took on the Fever on Saturday night. “We don’t want you to ride our coattails because our platform is growing faster than any other league in the world.”
Stewart is pointing to two very large sides of the WNBA’s coin right now that the Fever and their presence in this league embody and represent. The league’s platform is as large as it has ever been, which has been the result of the large growth on both the business and basketball sides. And with that larger umbrella comes a struggle to maintain the WNBA’s identity, one that has been founded on inclusivity and safety for its players, employees and fans.
The Fever take their historic offense and complicated following back to Chicago on Sunday night against their mid-west rivals the Chicago Sky on NBC and Peacock at 7 pm ET. Last time these two teams met, there was on-court tension that resulted when Sky wing DiJonai Carrington committed a flagrant 2 foul on Cunningham.
Both teams will be eager for a win. The Sky could be eliminated from the playoff picture with a loss while the Fever are looking to get back on track after two straight losses.
But what makes the Fever’s play on the court so challenging to match up with? And, what exactly makes their path to the WNBA finals so fascinating and eerily similar to where the Las Vegas Aces sat around three years ago?
The Fever have three of the best players in the league who are having career seasons. Clark’s scoring and efficiency are career highs along with leading the league again in assists. Aliyah Boston is also having the best scoring and three point shooting year of her career. While Boston just attempts 2.7 threes a game, her 41.7% clip hitting these shots makes the Fever even more dangerous offensively.
Although amid Boston’s career year, there is some concern about if she’s going to be able to sustain her best play come the postseason. The team announced that Boston won’t be playing on Sunday against the Sky and has been ruled out for precaution. The Fever have been managing Boston’s lower right leg injury all season long, and she won’t be able to rest during the FIBA World Cup break. She’ll be playing for Team USA.
And last but certainly not least, Kelsey Mitchell has emerged as the best scorer in the league. Mitchell is shooting 50% from the field on over 17 shot attempts per game while also making 44.8% of the 6.5 three-pointers she attempts per game. These are all career highs while playing over 32 minutes a game.
While Clark is known for her shooting and passing ability, Boston for her front court dominance on both ends, it is Mitchell that has always made this team go. She did so during the team’s playoff run last season where they were a hair away from the 2025 WNBA finals.
But earlier this season the Fever dealt with a lot of on-court growing pains. Clark hadn’t played with Mitchell and Boston in a while since she spent most of 2025 out with injury. This period of trials and tribulations was most publicly on display when the Fever got whacked by the Portland Fire at the end of May.
But in the later half of August, the Fever have a sizzling offense, and if the season were to end today, it would be the best in league history, ahead of the 2023 Aces.
To be clear, these comparisons to how the Aces functioned offensively aren’t exact, but there’s proximity. Kelsey Plum played with the speed and pace that Clark and Mitchell play with. Chelsea Gray’s ability to consistently hit the most difficult shots is very Mitchell-coded, and Boston’s two-way dominance inside the paint with her added ability to shoot beyond the arc has only made her more versatile.
The difference between the two teams remains their defense. The Aces had the best defense in the WNBA during their 2023 championship season.
The Fever is still very much a work in progress. While Indiana’s defensive rating might not obviously equate to progress throughout the regular season, personnel changes and degrees of buy-in have changed their defensive equation.
White’s decision to start sophomore Makayla Timpson, a 6'2 super athletic and long forward next to Boston has made a difference. Timpson can guard almost any position and her switchability onto guards has been a boon for the Fever’s evolving defense.
“Just her length can affect things, and we can do different defensive matchups with her with the way she can move her feet as well,” Clark said of Timpson. “She’s not just long and athletic, she moves laterally, really well too.”
In addition to having more defensive versatility on the floor next to Boston, there has been noticeable progress from both Mitchell and Clark on the defensive end. Both have been more focused and have studied up.
“Clark has done a better job of being more prepared, doing her job,” WNBA analyst Steve Jones Jr. said on his podcast The Dunker Spot.
He also noted that Mitchell has been playing committed defense all season long, something that has gone relatively unnoticed across the league. “There’s possession against the Dream where she was all over the court,” he said.
White knows that amid these improvements, the Fever can’t just be satisfied where they are defensively. Her goal is for the Fever to have a defensive rating in the upper third to middle of the league which means a defensive rating between fifth and seventh. As of this writing, the Fever sit at eleventh.
It won’t be good enough for the Fever to really contend according to White. But it’s not just a defensive rating. White also looks at field goal percentage defense, rebounding and the opponent’s free throw attempts.
“I think we give up about 14 more points a game,” she said about when the Fever lose games. “We give up about five or six more free throws a game. We hold teams in, I would say, the mid to low 40s in wins and up in the 50s [opponents are] shooting in losses. And so I think we’ve just got to be, we’ve got to be middle of the pack for sure because we do have a unique ability to score at a high rate. I ‘m not sure that I’ve ever had a team that can score like this.”
All the while the Fever’s identity on both sides of the ball continued to develop, the buy-in that they have in who they are and who they are being led by clear. After White’s drop the mic moment where she responded to angry fans who insinuated that she wasn’t sticking up for Cunningham after her altercation with Carrington, White was booed by the Fever’s home crowd.
The Fever’s three stars in Boston, Clark and Mitchell all were demonstrative in their disappointment with their fans.
“I told her to her face, I said, ‘Coach, you know this is for you,’ in terms of a sense of confidence, a sense of awareness that she’s not alone,” Mitchell said. “It really hurt my feelings to see her kind of have emotions in terms of not feeling valued and not feeling wanted in a place where she has to coach. At the end of the day, this is her job and she has to show up, too, and I think people don’t really realize that, but it’s our job to remind her.”
That buy-in and trust was on display after the Fever lost 85-91 to the Wings on August 20. Guard Lexie Hull was asked postgame following the loss about how various personalities on the Fever including Clark, Mitchell, Cunningham and Boston can all coexist. Hull pointed toward the team culture that White has established that has helped the team battle through adversity on the court and off of it, and noise that’s both internal and external.
“You get to show up every single day, and everyone loves you,” Hull said. “And you get to show up exactly the way you are, and I think that’s something that’s so special about coming to work every day is that we get to come and and be surrounded by love and happiness and joy, and we laugh, we enjoy our time together, and I think that’s what’s so special about this group.”
Questions remain on if the Fever’s defensive identity can improve, if Boston will be healthy enough to be the best version of herself throughout the playoffs and if this team can sustain the epic highs and lows that come with the position they occupy in 2026’s WNBA.
Something that newer fans and observers of the league might not remember is the high level of adversity, scandal and drama that the 2023 Aces had to endure.
The Aces dealt with major injuries to Candace Parker, who was playing in what would be her final WNBA season. The franchise was also dealing with accusations of manipulation and discrimination of former player Dearica Hamby, and subsequent investigations from the league when it came to circumventing the salary cap and making under the table payments to players.
The Aces also dealt with the arrest of Riquana Williams, one of their key role players from their 2022 Championship roster, for domestic violence charges. Williams was barred from the team following the arrest.
That is a lot of scandal and adversity to encompass one team in one season. Yet in 2023, those huge news stories still weren’t being as widely covered as they would be now, when the WNBA’s platform is much larger than it was three years ago.
The ingredients are there, not just offensively, but are in the battle-tested mentality in dealing with outside noise that the Fever have dealt with all season long.
It wouldn’t be a shock if the Fever are sitting at their first WNBA Finals this October since 2015. There would be a lot of familiar faces between both Finals teams that are now 11 years apart. White was still the head coach, current defensive coordinator January was on roster as a player and Gary Kloppenburg, White’s assistant on her 2015 staff, has returned to the Fever following assistant Karima Christmas-Kelly going on maternity leave.
When the Aces were going up against the Liberty for the 2023 championship, it was Plum who painted the picture of why the Aces were ready for battle even after losing two starters in Gray and Kiah Stokes to injury.
“This team has responded all year,” Plum said. “We’ve been through a lot. We’ve been hurt, sued, arrested; you name it, we’ve done it. I’m confident in our group, and we’ve gone through a lot of adversity. We’ll be ready.”
While the circumstances aren’t mirrors, they sure are similar. With less than two months until October, the world is going to learn if the Fever too will be ready after facing so much vociferous noise.
