In a best-of-three series, losing Game 1 leaves a team one loss away from elimination. Indiana has recovered from such a situation before, beating Atlanta to reach the semifinals last year after dropping Game 1. But when the team you are facing is the one that crushed your 2025 trophy ambitions, there is more than enough reason to be worried. So, going from not “intentional” enough to being “humbled” isn’t what Rachel DeMita expected from a coach who led the Fever to the 2015 Finals in her first year as head coach.
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“It’s experience. Certainly, there’s no substitute for experience. Some of them got it a year ago. But oftentimes, you have to be humbled first. I mean, that’s life, right? You don’t always learn from the successes. You learn from being humbled,” Stephanie White told reporters when asked about the lack of urgency from her players in the loss, and DeMita was left baffled by the take.
“Have to be humbled???? in a 3-game series where your best chance of winning was to steal game 1????? I’m speechless,” the former college basketball guard wrote on X.
The week had already been uneven. The Fever beat Minnesota 96-77 at home on Sept. 22, then lost 86-66 in Minneapolis on Thursday in the regular-season finale, a season-low record. “We got to be real intentional,” White said afterward, describing intention through the image of a fist, saying you cannot close your fingers “without intentionally doing it”.
In Game 1, though, DeMita saw no fists, so she brought together her fingers to describe how things unraveled with a big zero.
“It was so disappointing from the Fever. The Indiana Fever went out there with zero fight. They went out there with zero focus. They went out there, kind of continuing on what they’ve done at the end of this season,” DeMita said on her Courtside Club podcast.
Game 1 turned in the second quarter. Indiana led 34-33 before Las Vegas closed the half on a 29-13 run, and the Aces went into the break up 62-47 and led by as many as 27. Those 62 points were just one shy of the Aces’ franchise record for points in a playoff half.
A’ja Wilson scored 38 points on 15-of-19 shooting with 16 rebounds and four blocks, and Jackie Young added 21 points and 10 assists. As a whole, Las Vegas shot 59% from the field and 47% from three, against 45% and 39% for Indiana. The Fever also turned the ball over 17 times, and the Aces scored 28 points off those turnovers.
No Fever player reached 20. Aliyah Boston led with 18 points in 25 minutes, limited by fouls. Clark had 15 points and 10 assists on 6-of-17 shooting with six turnovers, and Kelsey Mitchell went 4-of-16 for 12. And Mitchell has now had two straight games under 20 points after scoring 20 or more in a WNBA-record 27 consecutive regular-season games.
The loss was a tough display after last year, when the Fever won three elimination games in one postseason, the most by any team since the 2022 Connecticut Sun. The warning signs had been there, though. Indiana had produced the best offensive rating in WNBA history, yet its 108.3 defensive rating was the worst among the eight playoff teams. Moreover, the Fever went just 10-12 against teams that reached the postseason.
Indiana also entered the series allowing 42.7 points in the paint per game, the third-highest figure among playoff teams. Add to that the 10.3 fast-break points allowed per game, again, the highest figure among the playoff teams.
White linked the loss to those turnovers. “Your first line of transition defense is offensive execution,” she said, crediting Las Vegas with understanding the intensity of the moment and noting that, as the defending champions, the Aces were supposed to win Game 1. Indiana, she said, now has to go home and win Game 2. Clark, meanwhile, called the team’s offensive actions sloppy and gave the Fever an F for its defensive effort, saying Indiana failed to make Las Vegas work for difficult shots.
DeMita also slammed White for her rotations in Game 1, questioning White’s decision to use lineup combinations she believed had not been used during the regular season. WNBA broadcaster Robin Lundberg shared that sentiment as he also questioned White’s rotations and overall decision-making as the Fever struggled defensively.
And yet, White went deep into her bench only sparingly. Mercedes Russell played just 3:58, while Grace VanSlooten saw only 1:51. Notably, days before the playoffs, White had acknowledged that Indiana was still trying to determine which lineups could get stops when its defense wasn’t getting the job done.
That said, injury concerns definitely contributed to the loss. Boston’s health was particularly important as she was Indiana’s most important individual defensive matchup for Wilson. But she then left the regular-season finale with a leg injury, and Wilson followed with the historic outing she did. Tyasha Harris also exited that game in the third quarter with a left ankle injury and was carried to the locker room.