INDIANAPOLIS — Saturday was a 40-minute exchange of firepower between the Indiana Fever and the Dallas Wings.
Both teams offer high-powered offensive machines, anchored by two of the league’s biggest stars in Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers. In the season opener at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, the Wings came away with a 107-104 win over the Fever.
In front of a sell-out crowd, the teams changed leads 11 times, but it was mainly the Fever attempting to regain the advantage over the more efficient Wings. Guard Arike Ogunbowale led the Wings with 22 points while Bueckers and Odyssey Sims added 20 apiece. As a team, Dallas shot 52 percent from 3-point range (12 of 23) and outscored the Fever 25-12 in transition.
Clark had a shot to tie the game with seven seconds left as the Fever trailed by three. She shot-faked from deep, sending Bueckers flying, but her wide-open look rimmed out. Clark finished with 20 points, seven assists and five rebounds in her official return to the WNBA after missing most of last season with various injuries. Indiana’s Kelsey Mitchell led all scorers with 30 points, and Aliyah Boston added 23.
The first round of the WNBA’s newest blockbuster series belongs to the Wings.
‘Caitlin Clark Effect’ shows up in bursts
She missed the butterflies. That’s what Clark said before Saturday’s game. The nervous churn in her gut that nevertheless tells her she’s ready to play. When the Fever star couldn’t do anything but watch through all her injury issues in 2025, there was too much calm where the storm should’ve been.
“There’s just like a different juice inside of your body when you’re putting on your uniform and you’re mentally locked in to go play a basketball game,” Clark said. “Obviously, I was excited for my teammates last year. One-hundred percent. I was their biggest fan. But it’s not the same.”
Nor was she, at least for the first half of Saturday’s action. Clark followed a rousing welcome during pregame intros — it evoked the United Center crowd drowning out Michael Jordan’s name during his Chicago Bulls’ heyday — with a choppy first half. No 3-pointers. Two offensive fouls on obvious push-offs, the second a matter of total frustration with chest-to-chest defense. Shaky ballhandling. As time ran out before the break, Clark pounded the ball to the floor in frustration and voiced some sort of grievance to her head coach, Stephanie White.
There will still be questions about how close to 100 percent health she is. “We wouldn’t have played her 30 minutes if she wasn’t OK,” White said. At one point late in the fourth quarter, with the game very much in the balance, Clark had almost no burst to sprint back on defense and deter an easy Wings’ bucket. Her multiple in-game visits to the locker room were cast by Indiana as much ado about not that much. “Just getting my back adjusted,” Clark said. “It gets out of line pretty quickly.”
Said White: “This is going to be an ongoing thing. Not just her. We’ve had multiple players who have gone back. We don’t have the blue tent. But they’re going to go back and get adjusted and make sure the body is working.”
In the end, Clark didn’t hit a 3 in the last frame. She couldn’t get the one-on-one stop against Odyssey Sims with 35 seconds left, a score that gave Dallas a crucial five-point edge. Her clean look at a potential game-tying bomb with roughly six seconds left rimmed out. Mitchell, not Clark, was the Fever’s option on the final shot at the buzzer. Instead, one of the most explosive shooters in the history of the game was a decoy.
“Started off a little slow, just the anxiety of the first game, trying to work through that,” Clark said. “But overall felt good, felt fast out there. Felt I was literally a couple buckets away from putting together a really good game and helping us win.”
Simply having Clark available again for WNBA games is a victory on so many levels in the league’s 30th anniversary season. Clark’s final line (20 points on 7-of-18 shooting, seven assists, five turnovers) and the final score made for a bit of an anticlimax. “A lot to be proud of,” she said, “and a lot to learn from, too.” — Brian Hamilton
WNBA’s freedom of movement emphasis
The WNBA is emphasizing freedom of movement this season. The impact already appears significant through the preseason and few regular-season games that have been played.
More than 50 total player fouls were called in Saturday’s game in Indianapolis — 28 on the Wings and 25 on the Fever.
“Look, like I told (our players), like I told Alanna Smith as we were standing on the sideline having a conversation, this is what we want,” White said. “We need to overcorrect, so to speak, so that we have freedom of movement. So it’s a free-flowing offense. In all of our offseason, we have asked officials to call everything. The challenge and the question sometimes is: Is it consistent? So that’d be the next growth phase and growth area. But this is what we need to clean up, some of the stuff we saw last year.”
Physicality in the WNBA has come under heavy scrutiny over the past few years with players and coaches across the league calling for changes. In a recent interview with NPR, Lynx forward Napheesa Collier said the physicality in the WNBA made it not fun to watch or play.
This offseason, the league assembled a committee to evaluate potential changes, and the early result has been a heavy-handed whistle from officials. Atlanta Dream owner Renee Montgomery shared her opinion on social media, saying “freedom of movement is going to be a gamechanger,” clarifying in a follow-up post that it wasn’t a positive assessment.
For current players, officiating changes come with a steep learning curve.
“We can see they’re calling a little different,” Ogunbowale said. “We saw that in the preseason game, and I guess we just have to adapt because that’s going to happen. Unless we’re just going to be fouling out, a lot of us has five (fouls). We (Ogunbowale and Sims) both had five fouls. It’s been a long time since I had three fouls in the first half and almost fouling out. I guess show our hands and see what we can do. But yeah, it’s going to be a long season.”
Sims added: “We gotta adjust.” — Annie Costabile
