Caitlin Clark and Fever learn the value of the playoff experience: “Many of us have never been here”

UNCASVILLE, Conn. – Indiana head coach Christie Sides pauses every time she sees the graph showing the top four seeds and the playoff experience of their active rosters.

At the top are the No. 3 seed Connecticut Sun, for whom she has taken over the schedule. Their 222 postseason games total is second only to the Las Vegas Aces, who have won the title twice. The least experienced of the top four are the Minnesota Lynx with 130 games, who are led by a four-time WNBA champion as head coach.

Below it says in small print “The Fever: 19 games”.

“I didn't even know we had 19,” Fever general manager Lin Dunn said before the team practiced ahead of Game 2 at Mohegan Sun Arena on Tuesday.

The Fever are the least experienced playoff team in the field, and it showed in their Game 1 loss. They were undisciplined and panicked at key moments, turning a two-possession deficit into a runaway victory. Connecticut was more physical, sharper, and more focused on the game plan.

“We played against an experienced team in their home country that had tremendous playoff experience, which we didn’t have,” Dunn said. “And now we have some [experience] and let's see how we react to it. You can't talk about what it's like. You just have to experience it.”

Sides and her coaching staff will make their changes — getting better at physicality, strengthening their transition defense — but they can't make up for that loss of experience overnight, so the second-year head coach is making sure to enjoy the moment and keep perspective while still fighting to force a Game 3 at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis on Friday night.

“These guys are figuring it out, and this experience is going to be great for the future,” Sides said before practice on Tuesday. Before Game 1, she said without hesitation that she would be talking about championships in three to five years, as she first said last summer.

Four of the Fever's five starters have less than three years of WNBA experience. All of them went deep in March Madness in college, but entered the first round with zero WNBA playoff experience overall. That includes seven-year veteran guard Kelsey Mitchell.

Caitlin Clark, who just made it to two consecutive Final Fours, said Tuesday that the intensity, pressure and all-or-nothing situation are similar to those in college, but still different as a rookie at the pro level.

“It's a learning process for me too,” Clark said. “This is obviously my first playoff. For many of us, it's the first playoff for this team. We're all kind of in it at the same time and learning. You don't always know what to expect because many of us have never been here before.”

Every other team has at least one veteran — and usually several — who has reached the Finals or won championships. DeWanna Bonner, who first defended Clark in Game 1, won two titles in Phoenix. The Mercury won it all in her rookie year in 2009, but she came off the bench. Bonner, 37, will play her 82nd playoff game on Wednesday in her 62nd playoff start. Alyssa Thomas will play her 42nd playoff game, Brionna Jones her 32nd and DiJonai Carrington her 22nd.

“[It’s] Know what to expect from the environment [and] “We understand that the margin for error is much smaller,” Sun head coach Stephanie White said before coaching her 20th playoff game, including 11 games during the Fever's run to the 2015 finals.

Thomas said she remembers going into her first playoff in 2017 full of confidence as part of a young Sun group when it was still a simple elimination game. She didn't necessarily understand what it meant to be ready to play and experience the highs and lows of a playoff environment. No one could explain it, she said. It was a higher level of competition that you had to live through to understand. The more experienced Mercury knocked her out two years in a row even though the Sun were a higher seed.

“We weren't there and they were,” Thomas said. “It showed, but we also remembered that feeling and just kept working on it.”

Dunn's three-year plan for the Fever ended with “making the playoffs,” and they did that with flying colors. The Fever secured a No. 6 seed weeks before the season ended, reaching their first postseason since 2016 in a league that welcomes 75% of its teams to the party. The head coach of the Fever's 2012 championship team didn't give a timeframe for the next step toward a title, but hinted that the team would again look to free agency to fill some of the void.

“[The Sun] showed their championship experience and that rubs off on their teammates. It's contagious,” Dunn said. “And that's why we need to go down this path where we have more guys with that kind of experience.”

They can only play with what they have now. The Fever still have a large gap in playoff experience, but that number will now rise from 19 to 31 games.

“We can learn from this in some ways,” said Lexie Hull. “That every possession means something and that all five of us on the field just have to be really focused and fight and dive for the loose balls. That just means so much, especially tomorrow [in Game 2].”