Capable of beating anybody — that might look like an overstretch. But looking at Indiana Fever’s schedule this year, the argument appears steady. The Fever have beaten every team that has beaten them this year, except the Minnesota Lynx, whom they have met only once. With two more regular season games left against the Lynx, Caitlin Clark and Co. will have the chance to settle that score as well. However, Fever insider Tony East is ringing alarm bells. Because, per East, Indiana is still pretty rusty when it comes to holding your own in case the offense turns out to be better than yours.
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“I think, yeah, they are capable of quite a bit this year, and that’s because they have the best offense ever,” East said, speaking on WNBA Today, a video of which CLNS shared on their X page on Sunday. “The best offense the WNBA has ever seen is the Fever, and so that gives you a way to win against anybody. They can just score 115 points in a game, and they just win when that happens.”
“It’s wild how much they lose when they score over 100 points. There are eight teams in the playoffs, obviously. The other seven non-Fever teams are undefeated when they score 100 points, and the Fever have like seven losses in those instances. So their defense is not particularly good, obviously, but they score so much that I truly think they can beat anybody,” he added.
The offensive case for the 2026 Indiana Fever is genuinely historic. Their offensive rating is 116.8 points per 100 possessions, the highest mark in the WNBA this season.
Led by the electric backcourt of Caitlin Clark and Kelsey Mitchell, they are averaging 97.1 points per game, completely shattering the previous single-season scoring record of 93.9 set by the 2010 Phoenix Mercury. They are also the first team in league history to cross the 100-point threshold in 20 different games in a single season. With that, they are shooting better than anybody at 49.4 FG% and 39.4 3P%.
But as East pointed out, their defence has been the one consistent and glaring Achilles’ heel throughout the campaign. The Fever rank 11th out of 15 teams in defensive rating at 109.2 points allowed per 100 possessions, and are the lowest-rated defensive team among all qualified playoff contenders. They also surrender an average of 90.8 points per game, ranking 12th in the league.
For a team capable of outscoring anyone, the question of whether their defense can hold up when the games slow down and the margin for error shrinks is entirely legitimate. They have allowed 100 points eleven times this season and nine of those ended up in losses.
Despite that concern, East still maintains a degree of optimism about the Fever’s playoff chances. And a meaningful part of that confidence comes from what head coach Stephanie White showed last postseason.
“The reason I’m fairly confident is because of last year, Stephanie White’s first playoff run with this group,” East said. “They lost a lot. They don’t have Caitlin for the whole postseason. Sophie Cunningham serves for the full postseason. Kelsey Mitchell goes down literally like an overuse injury in their final game. And yet with like half hardship players, they were an overtime away from making the finals. Stephanie White’s playoff work was really strong.”
As East noted, that postseason run was built with a seriously depleted roster. The Fever entered the 2025 playoffs as the No. 6 seed without Caitlin Clark, Sophie Cunningham, Aari McDonald, Sydney Colson, and Chloe Bibby, who were all sidelined with injury. Indiana repeatedly had to turn to hardship signings, bringing in five different players to keep the roster afloat.
And yet, they still pulled off a significant upset in the opening round, defeating the No. 3 seed Atlanta Dream in a hard-fought best-of-three series. They then pushed the No. 2 seed and eventual champion Las Vegas Aces to the absolute limit before falling just short in an agonising overtime finish in a best-of-five series.
For East, the logic flows naturally from there. If Stephanie White could extract that much from a diminished roster, one without their biggest star for much of the postseason, the ceiling for what she can do with this version of the team is considerably higher.