INDIANAPOLIS — Life without Caitlin Clark was already going to be challenging for the Fever over the next two weeks, as Wednesday’s loss to the Dream showed.
But the difficulty was amplified by several degrees on Friday.
Sydney Colson, the only other point guard on the roster, left the game in the first quarter with a left leg injury and did not return. After being forced to recalibrate on the fly, the Fever then lost Sophie Cunningham, who had become the de facto point guard in the absence of Clark and Colson, late in the fourth quarter as she reaggravated an ankle sprain from the preseason.
While DeWanna Bonner led a spirited rally, the previously winless Sun held off the Fever to not only pick up their first win of the season, but hand the Fever their fourth loss in the opening six games.
“It’s hard when you keep losing people,” Bonner said postgame. “Like you try to piece it together and we came in with a one gameplan and then you lose your other point guard, so you got to pivot on the fly and we’re a new team at that.
“We were still trying to figure out when we had [Clark] and [Colson]. Then you lose those two pieces…like, you lose [Clark], we regroup. Then you lose [Colson], then you have to regroup. So just trying to stay together and stay positive and get through the storm right now.”
That storm is creating rough waters for the Fever early in the year. After starting fast offensively against the Sun, Indiana was dealt its first blow. Late in the first period, Colson went down during a scramble for a loose ball and had to be helped off the court and into the locker room.
“I think at the end of the first quarter into the second, it was like a gut punch and then we had to really reconfigure what we were doing on the offensive end,” head coach Stephanie White said postgame. “It affected us in the second quarter, no doubt, not having another primary ball handler.”
While the Fever had to take a by-committee approach to ballhandling, Cunningham was the one pulled out of position the most. It was a struggle as the Fever watched the Sun lead grow to as many as 15. By the time Cunningham went down after spraining her right ankle again, they still trailed by nine points.
However, while Colson’s injury was a gut punch, White said Cunningham’s injury provided a spark to the finish. Bonner was at the center of it, knocking down a trio of 3-pointers to give Indiana a 78-76 lead with 2:46 left.
The Sun, though, responded with back-to-back 3-pointers of their own to restore a lead they would not relinquish. Indiana had one final shot to win the game late, but Kelsey Mitchell’s 3-pointer missed wide, giving the Fever a third-straight loss.
“We came together as a team,” Bonner said of their fourth-quarter run, “and Steph said like, ‘Stay together. We’re being tested right now and we got to depend on each other and use each other for energy right now.’ The worst thing you can do is fall apart and go your separate ways at that point…But I think more than anything, better than a win, we still showed that we’re going to continue to fight right now.”
The Fever will need to keep fighting, because the outlook is gloomy. While White did not have an update on either Colson or Cunningham postgame, both players had to be helped off the floor, which isn’t a great sign for the immediate future.
There remains the possibility that an emergency hardship exemption could be granted if all of Colson, Cunningham and Clark are out as it would take the Fever below 10 available players, though that would begin eating into the very limited cap space the team has.
Even in that scenario, the team is also welcoming a guard who is likely not familiar with the offense or the team. They will be the lone point guard on the roster, so how much they can rely on that player for big minutes would also be up in the air, too.
And that’s the best-case scenario.
“We got to get creative,” White said. “We got to figure out who can get us into offense. We got to figure out what actions we can run and we’re going to have to do the same thing defensively, honestly, and from a rotation standpoint. But that’s what we do. That’s our job, right? Like we got to figure it out. We’ve got to get creative on both ends of the floor.”
This also comes at a time when the Fever were hoping to be racking up wins. Facing a four-game stretch against the Mystics, Sun and Sky, teams that had a combined two wins coming into the week, was supposed to be the chance for the Fever to get things right in a new offense.
Now, after losses to Washington and Connecticut to kick off that stretch, it’s become more of a challenge to just survive and adapt.
“I mean it’s basketball,” Bonner said. “Those things happen. Unfortunately, it’s happening for us. It’s better to happen now than later on in the year because we’re still so early and we could still figure it out and adjust to it…We’re just going back [to the drawing board] to just keep starting over every day.”
As Bonner noted, the silver lining is that all of this is coming in May and not in September. Ideally, this will be an early challenge that the Fever can learn and grow from, which will pay dividends later in the season. At the very least, it’s going to give a team with title aspirations an early test of their resolve.
“There’s no question we’re hitting adversity right now,” White said. “Like it’s challenging and it’s still a great opportunity for us because it’s not going to be perfect. It’s early enough in the season that we’ve got a chance to really, I think, find a gut check moment and who we’re going to be through adversity.”
