play1:18Kelsey Mitchell has to be helped off after injuryDuring the third quarter, Kelsey Mitchell sustains an injury. A stretcher is brought out, but she’s able to walk off with assistance.
play1:09Fever take down Aces in Game 4 to even seriesAliyah Boston and Kelsey Mitchell combine for 49 points to boost the Fever to a win in Game 4 over the Aces.
Kelsey Mitchell has to be helped off after injuryDuring the third quarter, Kelsey Mitchell sustains an injury. A stretcher is brought out, but she’s able to walk off with assistance.
During the third quarter, Kelsey Mitchell sustains an injury. A stretcher is brought out, but she’s able to walk off with assistance.
Fever take down Aces in Game 4 to even seriesAliyah Boston and Kelsey Mitchell combine for 49 points to boost the Fever to a win in Game 4 over the Aces.
Aliyah Boston and Kelsey Mitchell combine for 49 points to boost the Fever to a win in Game 4 over the Aces.
Alexa PhilippouOct 2, 2025, 10:45 AM ETCloseCovers women’s college basketball and the WNBA Previously covered UConn and the WNBA Connecticut Sun for the Hartford Courant Stanford graduate and Baltimore native with further experience at the Dallas Morning News, Seattle Times and Cincinnati EnquirerFollow on X
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.
“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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
