INDIANAPOLIS — The Indiana Fever have played in 282 regular season games since 2018. Kelsey Mitchell has played in 277 of them.
If that has been a matter of skill and health and a little bit of luck, it has also been a matter of faith. Mitchell has played under five coaches in her eight seasons in Indianapolis. She played through the worst season in franchise history, and the second-worst, and the third-worst. (And, of course, because this is how it went around here, those did not come in three consecutive years but instead were spread across five.) She played in nearly empty gyms and on the state fairgrounds and at college campuses. She played through a rebuild. She played through a period so directionless that it could not reasonably be described as building toward anything. She played through an endless construction zone. And she kept playing.
Oh, did she ever. Mitchell has played more in the last eight years than anyone else in the WNBA. That’s simple arithmetic: Those 277 games, nearly always in the starting lineup, 8,466 minutes total, comfortably atop the playing time leaderboard with fewer than a dozen players coming within even a thousand minutes of her. But the statement feels true spiritually as much as statistically. Mitchell has logged more time on the floor than anyone else in the last eight years, but she has made her time feel more expansive, too. She plays in the way that some sharks swim—like she will die if she ever stops moving. Other players are cleaner and more patient and more efficient. None are faster.
That playing time means that Mitchell knows the Fever’s trajectory more intimately than anyone else. All of those games, all of those fast, frenetic minutes. Years spent losing in front of almost no one. Then losing in front of seemingly everyone. Finally winning in front of everyone and then some. Plenty of people have borne witness to that transformation of the franchise. A few have personally shaped it. But none have lived it quite like Mitchell.
All of which has led here, to a season on the brink, down 2–1 to the Aces in the WNBA semifinals. It marks the deepest playoff run in a decade for the Fever. And it has come in a year when they have faced a string of hardships so extensive as to feel almost literally unbelievable. (Plenty of teams know the difficulty of losing their point guard. Not many know the difficulty of then losing their backup, and the backup to the backup, too.) With a backcourt torn apart by season-ending injuries—to Caitlin Clark, of course, but also to Sydney Colson, Aari McDonald and Sophie Cunningham—they nonetheless have managed to advance through the postseason. And they have done it living and dying with Mitchell.
This is not how this season was meant to play out. Back when Mitchell re-signed with the Fever in January, she did it with the understanding that everything about this group was changing, and she would, too. Indiana was finally aiming not just at the playoffs but at a potential championship. That meant a new head coach (Stephanie White) and a new front office (Kelly Krauskopf and Amber Cox) along with enough new players to fill out half the roster. It was also meant to introduce a slightly different role for Mitchell. “Kelsey has had to be a high-volume scorer for the Indiana Fever her entire career,” White said at the beginning of the season. Yet with this upgraded roster, ideally, she would no longer have to be. They would have options. She would have space.
But front offices make plans and basketball gods laugh. As the injuries kept coming and the hardship contracts piled up this summer, Mitchell instead ended up taking more shots than she ever had before for the Fever. (She ended up taking more shots than anyone in the WNBA.) Her usage rate was the highest that it had been in years. On this new-look, big-swing roster, Mitchell was shouldering more of the weight than ever in some ways. Yet she was carrying it more effectively, too.
Mitchell finished the regular season as a finalist for MVP. She tore into the postseason with the freneticism you might expect from a player who had waited seven years for her first playoff game and was still waiting for her first playoff win. The Fever got that win, and they won that series, and they splashed into the semifinals with a sterling performance from Mitchell. She dropped 34 points to lead an upset of the Aces in Game 1.
That performance has naturally proven hard to replicate against this Las Vegas defense. In Game 3 on Friday—the first home game of the series for Indiana—Mitchell played with an intensity that felt almost desperate. She led the Fever in scoring, as she usually does, with 21. But that came only through 8-of-26 shooting. It was enough to help them hang tight through three quarters and not very much so after that.
“You’ve gotta miss a couple to make a couple,” Mitchell told the broadcast at halftime.
It was not a metaphor. But it easily could have been. Mitchell had been made to miss so many more than a couple in those early years in Indianapolis. And while it had been a relatively easy choice for her to sign her first contract extension with the Fever in 2021, it was a much harder one to sign another in ’25, even after the viewership had exploded and the stadium had begun selling out and the franchise had committed to going all the way in. Mitchell had been through so much change here. She did not know if she wanted to commit to even more.
She finally decided that she did. “I don’t think this experience would be what it is without what it was,” she said at the beginning of the season. “I think it makes for a better ending.” And when leadership spoke about the desire to finally make that deep playoff run, they spoke about Clark, and they spoke about 2023 No. 1 pick Aliyah Boston, but they mostly spoke about Mitchell. They wanted her to experience making a couple exactly where she had missed a couple.
“No one deserves that more than Kelsey Mitchell,” Indiana general manager Amber Cox said in May. “For all that she’s been through with the franchise and the loyalty that she’s had to the Indiana Fever.”
They did not expect this playoff run to look how it does. They did not expect to be a No. 6 seed. They did not expect the bench to be so full of injuries that players spill over across two rows.
What they did expect was Mitchell. She has logged the most playoff minutes of any player on this roster. The Fever have alternately sparked and stalled and shone, and Mitchell, as ever, has kept playing.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as In a Season of Uncertainty for the Fever, Kelsey Mitchell Has Been a Sure Thing.
