The bad path of injury continues for the most popular team in the WNBA, the Indiana Fever.
It started with Caitlin Clark getting injured a couple of times and continued with the Fever staff deciding to keep her on the sidelines rather than put here back in the game when she isn't 100%. The other players started to pick up the slack and Kelsey Mitchel in particular started to step up and become a real scoring force. However, this doesn't change the fact that they have lost 3 guards this season to injury in Caitlin Clark, Sydney Colson, and Aari McDonald being out for the foreseeable future.
Clark may return to the active roster soon whereas the others are likely to stay out for the season and officially, that is what Indiana says in the case for them. Odyssey Sims was signed to a "hardship" contract which is allowed when a team has no replacement players to fill a spot, but because she is completely unfamiliar with the team play she hasn't been much of a force to be dealt with on the hardwood.
Sophie Cunningham has really stepped to the forefront in the latter half of this year's season becoming a key player for the Fever but unfortunately over the weekend disaster struck once again for Indiana.
This happened just 10 minutes into the game vs. the Sun but it is a devastating blow to Indiana's roster, as if they didn't have enough problems as it already is.
The Fever were not doing well in the game up to this point they managed to only score 11 points in the first quarter in total. At the end of the first half they were down 48-29 and defeat looked eminent. What makes this situation look even worse is the fact that Connecticut is the worst team in the Eastern conference with 6 wins and 27 losses on the season.
Something magical happened in the 2nd half though and the Fever were able to battle their way back to force overtime, and then win the game 99-93.
Kelsey Mitchell once again had an outstanding game with 38 points including going 5-8 for 3-point range. They are using Kelsey so much at this point though that one has to ask how much longer can Kelsey, who is 30 years old, possibly keep up this pace?
We can look at her scoring acumen and be supportive of her for sure, but we also need to look at the very real fact that at 5 foot 8, she is almost entirely an offensive tool and won't be of much use in the paint as far as defense is concerned.
Sophie Cunningham on the other hand is no spring chicken herself at 29 years of age but she is considerably taller and no one will argue that at least for now, she is a rather essential part of the Fever's starting lineup. Yet another guard is out injured (potentially) and this could be very bad news for Indiana for the rest of the season.
The good news, if we were try to look for a silver lining to this gloomy cloud, is that newcomer Odyssey Sims had a stellar game vs the Sun with 19 points and 7 assists. The 4 turnovers are less than amazing but we have to be fair and recognize that Caitlin Clark herself had a less-than-amazing turnover-to-assist ratio.
Let's take a look at Odyssey Sims shot spread for this recent game.
Credit where credit is due on the impressive 19 points but look at this spread on where shots are made and missed. This is an easy opponent to guard.
For contrast, here is Kelsey Mitchell's shot spread
Where is she going to shoot from? Well, probably somewhere on the left but other than that, you don't really know.
I think most Indiana fans at this point need to keep their fingers crossed and hope that this knee injury to Cunningham was just a "knock" and that she will be fine for later games. If she is out for a long time, this could be a bit disastrous for the team and as a coach you may want to consider the very real possibility that attempting to win the championship can very likely result in even more injury and damage to the team's future.
What would you do in this situation? Sit it out for the rest of the year and piss off the fans? or do you risk injuring the remaining star players that you have?
This incident with Cunningham has brought about a couple of conversations that I think really should be discussed in greater detail and that is bench depth of the WNBA (they can't afford it) and also a potential overhaul of the officiating. There's a lot of people being I think rightfully critical of how violent the games are being allowed to become. But I'll save that for another day.