LAS VEGAS — It can feel redundant to list everything that is missing for the Fever. There is nothing fresh about the battered backcourt, the obscenely full bench, the injury report with so many lines in such fine print that it reads like an eye exam. All of that has been true for weeks now. It can still feel striking. But it gets old, at a certain point, to focus on what is not here rather than what is.
So as regulation became overtime in Game 5 of the WNBA semifinals, as the weight of the season found itself packed down into the space of five minutes, here is who made their way onto the floor for the Fever.
This was a collective exercise in adjusting on the fly. Here was Odyssey Sims, who had been without a roster spot just two months ago, whose career transaction log is so long that it makes her name feel apt. Here was 36-year-old Shey Peddy, who needed seven years to break into the league and still plays with the kind of frantic, passionate urgency that journey would suggest. Here was Lexie Hull, the ultimate role player, who earned a starting gig this year on the power of a sheer hustle. Here was Natasha Howard—well, sure, there had to be one player you would have expected to be here at the beginning of the season. Here was Brianna Turner, readying for the jump ball at center court, who did not start a game all year after being signed to be the final piece of this bench. This was a worst-case scenario that somehow felt like a miracle.
It was remarkable even by the standards of this particular team. The Fever made their push to the playoffs without Caitlin Clark, Sophie Cunningham, Aari McDonald, Sydney Colson and Chloe Bibby, all of whom had been lost to season-ending injuries, and without Damiris Dantas, who spent the last few weeks in concussion protocol. But that only increased their reliance on the few players who had stayed healthy enough to remain constants in this starting lineup.
Indiana does not do much without Aliyah Boston, who has developed into a critical, bruising force in the paint. And it does not do anything without Kelsey Mitchell, the longest tenured and longest suffering member of this roster, who has alternately driven and dragged her team along with her.
And then it found itself staring down the stretch of this game without either.
Midway through the third quarter, Boston helped carry Mitchell off the court after the former had been whistled for her fifth personal foul and the latter had gone down with severe cramping. The No. 6 seed Fever trailed the No. 2 seed Aces just 59–55. But those four points might as well have been 40. Their leading scorer and main perimeter threat was headed to a nearby hospital to receive fluids. Their biggest interior presence was severely compromised by foul trouble. It had already felt like a small wonder that Indiana had pushed Las Vegas to a do-or-die Game 5, but now it found itself more diminished, more disadvantaged, more desperate. Every basketball fairytale has to run up against the logic of the sport eventually, and here, it seemed, was that moment for the Fever.
Except it was not. Their five on the floor kept coming up with spurts of inexplicable magic. Here was the ball glancing off outstretched fingertips. Here was a chance to benefit from mystifying blown coverage from the best defender in the league. Here was Sims—pulling up from midrange, driving in the lane, scoring every time she needed to score. Here was a way to stay alive for one more possession. The Fever did not have all of the answers. But they kept forcing new questions.
Boston fouled out. Indiana did not hold the lead at any point in the second half. And it ultimately did not matter. The Fever outscored the Aces 23–15 in the fourth quarter and pulled out a defensive stop to force overtime. With their frayed roster at its most threadbare, and then some, they put themselves minutes away from the WNBA Finals.
“When Kelsey went down, I felt we let up, and that was a mistake emotionally,” said Aces coach Becky Hammon. “They just wouldn’t go away.”
It was, to be sure, a baffling display of execution from the Aces. (It’s hard to remember another team whose postgame news conference after making the Finals had so many examples of what to fix and improve.) It was just as much a compelling display of the opposite from the Fever.
The logic finally outran the magic in overtime. Las Vegas looked like a roster angling for a third trip in four years to the WNBA Finals, and Indiana looked like a roster that was both very desperate and very, very tired. The final score was Aces 107, Fever 98, and Indiana coach Stephanie White was asked if she had ever been part of a game like that, where her group pushed the limits of the word resilience, where everything went so wrong but so right, too.
Eyes red, towel around her neck, White answered the only way that she could: Hadn’t most of them gone that way this year?
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as The Magic Finally Ran Out for the Fever.
