Anxiety is a tricky thing. It creeps in when the pressure is high, decisions are fast, and expectations are huge. And believe it or not, even professional athletes aren’t immune to it. This time, it got the better of the Indiana Fever. And we know that the Fever tends to mental exhaustion. That got cleared up when last year, “These guys are not just physically exhausted, they’re mentally exhausted,” said ex-HC Christie Sides. Back then, a stretch of 11 games in 20 days got this confession out of her.
And in a similar pattern, current HC Stephanie White has come forward with one after they have played nine games in 18 days. It’s the only way to explain how they snapped a 3-game winning streak against the second-worst-ranked team in the league. Fever HC Stephanie White wasn’t in any mood to externalize the focus. In the postgame presser, she opened with, “Sometimes we get a little too anxious.”
She went on to add “like if someone is attacking us, instead of making them hit tough shots over the top and living with that (because the best players in the world are going to make really good shots), we try to finish the play with a block or by sliding in at the last moment, or something similar.” That’s actually true. The best players, Kelsey Plum, Azura Stevens, and Rickea Jackson, did not leave any gaps at all last night. At 2:34 in the 3Q, Plum hit a 26-foot three-pointer to take the lead back (70-67).
Then, with just 1:31 remaining in the 4Q, Rickea Jackson made a tough 3-foot shot. And drew a foul on Natasha Howard. She converted for 1. That’s the exact kind of great play by a rising star that Coach White is referring to. Finally, at the 0:03, 4Q mark, Stevens iced the game by hitting a pressure-free throw to push the lead to 89-87. Stephanie White didn’t stop there, though.
She reinforced it by saying, “sometimes, we just have to accept that great players will make great plays,” and added where Indiana could have done better, “and we shouldn’t bail them out by fouling.” It could not have gotten more appropriate. If you watched the action live, it’s not hard to tell that White was calling out Natasha Howard and Aari McDonald. Mostly for the personal and shooting fouls they made, especially towards the end of the 4th quarter. That allowed the Sparks to go to the line 5 times in the last 3 minutes, racking up points.
The Fever could have absolutely avoided this close loss with just a more active presence, or maybe not?
Another Game, Another Reason from Stephanie White
Like clockwork, Head Coach Stephanie White had more analysis of what went wrong vs. the Sparks. “I think they just put their head down and started to attack us,” she said. She was explaining how the Sparks took advantage of mismatches. When bigger players like Rickea Jackson and Azurá Stevens attacked Indiana’s smaller guards on defense.. “They did a really good job of recognizing when our guards, our small guards, got switched on to,” White added.
As always, she was blunt about her team’s preparation failures. She admitted, “Some of those screens, screener actions that they ran, we went over for the past two days. So we weren’t very disciplined in that.” The coach even noticed a clear difference in poise between the teams: “I felt like they let the game come to them… and we, on the other hand, really felt pressed.”
What makes this loss sting more is how similar it is to their earlier collapse against the same Sparks team. That time, the Fever blew an eight-point fourth-quarter lead, and White blamed the loss on a missing “killer instinct,” lapses in communication, and undisciplined play. Sound familiar? Yes, because they have a tendency to crumble in crunch time.
When the same problems show up with different names week after week, one has to wonder, how many more reasons will she give before the results finally change? Do you also feel so?
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