WNBA: Kelsey Mitchell leading Indiana Fever through injury bug

The 2025 Indiana Fever are no strangers to playing shorthanded. Caitlin Clark, the team’s focal point and the WNBA’s reigning Rookie of the Year, has played in just 13 games this season due to a nagging groin injury, and the Fever recently lost two more guards–Aari McDonald, who had been starting in Clark’s place, and backup Sydney Colson to season-ending injuries.

Despite this, Indiana has been on the upswing, improving to 18-14 with a win over the Chicago Sky. The Fever had hovered around .500 for much of the season but have won six of their last eight games, and are now just a game and a half behind the Phoenix Mercury for fourth place in the standings.

Unsurprisingly, overcoming adversity was a popular theme in the team’s postgame press conference. Head coach Stephanie White praised her group’s selflessness and knack for elevating one another, while shooting guard Kelsey Mitchell called this year’s Fever “the most resilient team [she’s] ever been a part of.”

With the Fever disastrously thin in the backcourt – at least for the time being – it’s Mitchell who has had to adapt the most. On Saturday, Indiana’s leading scorer was tasked with playing point guard, initiating the team’s offense and distributing the ball while also hunting her own shot, which is something she said she hasn’t done since her days at Ohio State.

The result: A team-high 26 points on 9-for-18 shooting to go along with eight assists and only one turnover.

“I think it brings out the vulnerable side of me – the leadership in which I need to keep getting better at,” Mitchell, humble as always, said after the game. “I believe in my team. So seeing my assists go up, it’s just because of these girls. We have an unbelievable chemistry when it comes to seeing and reading each other.”

“She let the game come to her. Her decision-making has been really good,” added White. “Her shot was really good, as it always is, and we know that she’s going to create a lot of gravity because of what she does on the offensive end. She did a really good job of picking her moments and finding her teammates when she needed to.”

Striking that balance will be critical for Mitchell if the Fever are going to keep winning. She’s been one of the WNBA’s most gifted scorers for years and, at nearly 20 points per game, she’s enjoying perhaps the best season of her career. Indiana won’t get very far if Mitchell doesn’t shoot the basketball.

At the same time, the Fever are now alarmingly low on players who can handle the ball. Center Aliyah Boston took on more of a playmaking role during Clark’s first injury-related absence, and that’s a luxury that White and her staff will probably want to take advantage of again, but in terms of bringing the ball up the court and getting the Fever settled, Mitchell is going to be their go-to guard for the time being. How efficiently she juggles that responsibility with her normal scoring outbursts will be important for a Fever offense that has already had to re-establish its own identity several times this season.

Fever turn to Sims to help carry the load in their backcourt

To lessen the burden on Mitchell, the Fever signed veteran guard Odyssey Sims to a hardship contract. The 2019 All-Star has made quite a few stops around the WNBA, many of them coming on hardship or short-term contracts, so her experience was surely of interest to a team in desperate need of another ball handler. Sims most recently appeared in 12 games for the Los Angeles Sparks, averaging 9.8 points and 3.5 assists per game at the beginning of the 2025 season before she was released.

Like Mitchell, Sims has generally been known as more of a scoring guard, but she’s averaged better than five assists per game on three separate occasions. Given how reliant the Fever are on Mitchell’s shooting, Sims will probably be asked to take on a good amount of the team’s playmaking duties once she gets acclimated, in addition to leading the team’s second unit when Mitchell is on the bench.