Stephanie White Shares What Separates Fever From WNBA Championship Contenders

The Indiana Fever fell to 12-12 on the 2025 WNBA regular season after their 98-84 defeat to the New York Liberty on July 22.

Given that the Liberty were the WNBA champions last season and are clearly among the favorites to win it again this year, Indiana facing them always serves as a good barometer of how the Fever stack up in terms of being championship contenders themselves.

Alas, Indiana went 1-3 against New York this year (although two of those losses came without Caitlin Clark). But the Fever being .500 through 24 games certainly doesn’t make them feel like a true championship contender right now, despite the hype they had heading into this season.

Fever coach Stephanie White spoke with the media after Tuesday’s loss and was asked what she thinks is missing for the Fever to compete against top teams.

“Look, that’s for everybody else to discuss, whether we were really ready to be a contender or not. Certainly, there’s no substitute for experience… And so you’ve got to go through it. I do think disruption in rotation, playing players in different positions because of that disruption, hasn’t allowed the continuity probably as much as we’d like,” White said, per the Fever’s YouTube account.

“The difference in championship-caliber teams are those two and three minutes in a ballgame, where you can’t have the miscommunications, you can’t have the breakdowns, you can’t have the poor shot selection, whatever it may be. Games and series are won and lost in those margins, and right now we might have moments,” she added.

“But those two minutes matter. And we’ve got to get to a point where we don’t have those moments and those lulls.”

The good news is that the Fever don’t have to play the Liberty again in the 2025 regular season. The bad news is that they’d need to find a way past them if they wanted to contend for a WNBA title.

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