The Indiana Fever’s loss to the Washington Mystics was perhaps their most significant one this season, but that wasn’t clear from their play. The team looked woefully unprepared for a game that could have a major impact on their playoff seeding, and that difference in play caught the eye of one former ESPN host.
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During the most recent episode of the Linda Cohn Show, the host had a segment where she discussed the team’s loss to the Mystics and made it clear that she believed it was more than just a poor shooting night for the stars, taking aim at the coaching staff.
“When a team comes out like that, I tend to blame the coaching staff for not having these players prepared,” she said during the episode, which was clipped and posted to X by @SnapshotKyle.
“I would do it for any team, any sport, when a team comes out flat. I blame the coaches. Caitlin Clark can do just so much. And now the best team in the league is waiting for them in the Minnesota Lynx. And they are licking, licking their chops.”
Her particularly blunt assessment wasn’t without reason. Clark had one of her worst shooting nights this season, scoring 25 points on just 6-for-20 shooting from the field and 30% shooting from the three-point line, while also turning the ball over five times. Cohn made sure to not put the blame completely on Clark, especially when the entire team struggled.
Against one of the best defenses in the league, the Fever shot just 36.6% from the field and 21.4% from three, putting up just 77 points, their third-lowest mark this season. However, contrary to what Cohn said, head coach Stephanie White seemed to understand just how important the game was, as she made clear during the postgame press conference.
“Every one of these games that we’re playing right now is like playoff games,” she said, per ESPN. “We’ve got to understand collectively that everything has to take it up a notch. Intensity level. Preparation. Knowing personnel on our scouting report… At this time of the year, it’s not meant to be pretty basketball. It’s meant to be gritty basketball, and I think we have to be open to understanding that that’s the case. We got knocked in the mouth.”
What makes this loss hurt particularly much is that the Fever are now a game behind the Atlanta Dream for the No. 4 seed, which means the team might enter the postseason without home-court advantage. To make things worse, there is a very real chance that the team falls to the No. 8 seed: this would happen if they lose their final two games of the season to the league-leading Minnesota Lynx and the Mystics, New York Liberty, and Dallas Wings each win their remaining games.
Their loss against the Mystics also snapped Indiana’s three-game winning streak, as well as its four-game streak of scoring 100+ points.
After the game, Clark was just as disappointed with the team as Cohn, and hoped that a loss as demoralizing as this one wouldn’t occur again.
“You would love to say, hopefully, this is just a fluke, and you throw it away,” she said after the game. “At the same time, you’ve got to be able to learn from it. You’ve got to be able to assess it and figure out what went wrong. It just felt really flat. I felt like we looked tired. We looked like we just didn’t have our spunk.”
For Indiana, there is very little time to dwell on what went wrong against Washington, and the Fever still have an opportunity to get back into the #4 seed.
If Cohn’s assessment is right, the most important change the team makes might not be on the court, but in the coaching staff.