Caitlin Clark, Fever learning value of playoff experience: ‘A lot of us have never been here’

UNCASVILLE, Conn. — Indiana head coach Christie Sides pauses every time she sees the graphic listing out the top four seeds and their active rosters’ playoff experience.

Near the top are the No. 3 seed Connecticut Sun, the team for which she’s tasked with game-planning. Their 222 combined postseason games are second most behind the two-time reigning champion Las Vegas Aces. The least experienced of the top four are the Minnesota Lynx with 130 and who are led by a four-time WNBA champion head coach.

In small print at the bottom reads the Fever: 19 games.

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

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 pivotal moments, causing a two-possession deficit to balloon into a blowout. Connecticut was more physical, sharp and locked in to the game plan.

“We met a veteran team in their home arena that had enormous playoff experience, and we didn’t,” Dunn said. “And so now we’ve had some [experience] and let’s see how we respond to that. There’s no way you can talk about what it’s like. You just have to experience it.”

Sides and her coaching staff will make their changes — handling physicality better, shoring up their transition defense — but they aren’t able to make up for that experience gap overnight. Hence why the second-year head coach is making sure she enjoys the moment and keeps perspective while still competing to force a Game 3 at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis on Friday night.

“These guys, they’re figuring it out, and this is going to be great for the future, to get this experience,” Sides said Tuesday before practice. Ahead of Game 1, she didn’t hesitate in saying she’ll talk about championships in three to five years, as she first said last summer.

Four of the five Fever starters have fewer than three years of any WNBA experience. They all made deep March Madness runs in college, but came into the first-round series with zero combined games of WNBA playoff experience. That includes seven-year veteran guard Kelsey Mitchell.

Caitlin Clark, who is coming off back-to-back Final Fours, said Tuesday the intensity, pressure and win-or-go-home situation are similar to college, but still different as a rookie at the pro level.

“It’s a learning process for me, too,” Clark said. “Obviously, this is my first playoff. It’s a lot of us on this team’s first playoff. We’re all kind of going through it at the same point and learning. You don’t always know what to expect, because a lot of us have never been here.”

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

“[It’s] knowing what to expect from the environment [and] understanding that the margin for error is so much smaller,” Sun head coach Stephanie White said ahead of coaching her 20th playoff game, which includes 11 during the Fever’s 2015 run to the Finals.

Thomas said she remembered coming into her first playoff in 2017 as part of a young Sun group with confidence back when it was single elimination. She didn’t necessarily understand what it took to come in ready to play and live through the ups and downs of a playoff environment. No one can explain it, she said. It’s a higher level of competition one has to live through to understand. The more experienced Mercury knocked them out two years in a row despite the Sun being the higher seed.

“We hadn’t been there and they had,” Thomas said. “It showed, but we also remembered that feeling and just kept building up.”

Dunn’s three-year plan for the Fever ended with “make the playoffs,” and they’ve done that with aplomb. The Fever wrapped up the No. 6 seed weeks before the season ended to reach 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 put a timeframe on the next step of a winning title, but did indicate the team would be active in free agency again to fill parts of the gap.

“[The Sun] showed their championship experience, and it carries over to your teammates. It’s contagious,” Dunn said. “And so we’ve got to, we’ve got to move down that path where we’ve got more people with that type of experience.”

They can only go with who they have now. The Fever remain in a deep playoff experience deficit, but that number will now move from 19 to 31 games.

“We can learn from that in some regard,” Lexie Hull said. “That every possession means something, and that we all five on the court need to just be really locked in and competing and diving for those loose balls. It just means so much, especially tomorrow [in Game 2].”