Caitlin Clark, Fever realizing the importance of playoff experience: ‘Many of us are new to this’ | Playoffs

UNCASVILLE, Conn. — Indiana head coach Christie Sides pauses each time she sees the graphic itemizing out the high 4 seeds and their lively rosters' playoff expertise.

Near the high are the No. 3 seed Connecticut Sun, the crew for which she’s tasked with game-planning. Their 222 mixed postseason video games are second most behind the two-time reigning champion Las Vegas Aces. The least skilled of the high 4 are the Minnesota Lynx with 130 and who are led by a four-time WNBA champion head coach.

In small print at the backside reads the Fever: 19 video games.

“I didn’t even know we had 19,” Fever basic supervisor Lin Dunn mentioned earlier than the crew practiced at Mohegan Sun Arena on Tuesday forward of Game 2.

The Fever are the least skilled playoff crew in the area, and it confirmed of their Game 1 loss. They had been undisciplined and panicked at pivotal moments, inflicting a two-possession deficit to balloon right into a blowout. Connecticut was extra bodily, sharp and locked in to the recreation plan.

“We met a veteran team in their home arena that had enormous playoff experience, and we didn't,” Dunn mentioned. “And so now we've had some [experience] and let's see how we respond to that. There's no way you can talk about what it's like. You just have to experience it.”

Sides and her teaching employees will make their adjustments — dealing with physicality higher, shoring up their transition protection — however they aren’t in a position to make up for that have hole in a single day. Hence why the second-year head coach is ensuring she enjoys the second and retains perspective whereas nonetheless competing to drive a Game 3 at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis on Friday night time.

“These guys, they're figuring it out, and this is going to be great for the future, to get this experience,” Sides mentioned Tuesday earlier than apply. Ahead of Game 1, she didn’t hesitate in saying she’ll discuss championships in three to 5 years, as she first mentioned final summer season.

Four of the 5 Fever starters have fewer than three years of any WNBA expertise. They all made deep March Madness runs in faculty, however got here into the first-round sequence with zero mixed video games of WNBA playoff expertise. That consists of seven-year veteran guard Kelsey Mitchell.

Caitlin Clark, who's coming off back-to-back Final Fours, mentioned Tuesday the depth, stress and win-or-go-home state of affairs are related to faculty, however nonetheless completely different as a rookie at the professional stage.

“It's a learning process for me, too,” Clark mentioned. “Obviously, this is my first playoff. It’s a lot of us on this team's first playoff. We're all kind of going through it at the same point and learning. You don't always know what to expect, because a lot of us have never been here.”

Every different crew has at the least one veteran — and normally a number of — who has reached the Finals or received championships. DeWanna Bonner, who guarded Clark for the first time in Game 1, received two titles in Phoenix. The Mercury received all of it her rookie 12 months in 2009, however she got here off the bench. Bonner, 37, will play in her 82nd playoff recreation Wednesday in her 62nd playoff begin. Alyssa Thomas will play in her forty second playoff recreation, Brionna Jones in her thirty second and DiJonai Carrington in her twenty second.

“[It’s] knowing what to expect from the environment [and] understanding that the margin for error is so much smaller,” Sun head coach Stephanie White mentioned forward of teaching her twentieth playoff recreation, which incorporates 11 throughout the Fever’s 2015 run to the Finals.

Thomas mentioned she remembered coming into her first playoff in 2017 as half of a younger Sun group with confidence again when it was single elimination. She didn’t essentially perceive what it took to are available in prepared to play and dwell by way of the ups and downs of a playoff atmosphere. No one can clarify it, she mentioned. It’s the next stage of competitors one has to dwell by way of to perceive. The extra skilled Mercury knocked them out two years in a row regardless of the Sun being the increased seed.

“We hadn’t been there and they had,” Thomas mentioned. “It showed, but we also remembered that feeling and just kept building up.”

Dunn’s three-year plan for the Fever ended with “make the playoffs,” they usually’ve accomplished that with aplomb. The Fever wrapped up the No. 6 seed weeks earlier than the season ended to attain their first postseason since 2016 in a league that welcomes 75% of its groups to the get together. The head coach of the Fever’s 2012 championship crew didn’t put a timeframe on the subsequent step of a profitable title, however did point out the crew could be lively in free company once more to fill elements of the hole.

“[The Sun] showed their championship experience, and it carries over to your teammates. It's contagious,” Dunn mentioned. “And so we've got to, we've got to move down that path where we've got more people with that type of experience.”

They can solely go along with who they've now. The Fever stay in a deep playoff expertise deficit, however that quantity will now transfer from 19 to 31 video games.

“We can learn from that in some regard,” Lexie Hull mentioned. “That every possession means something, and that we all five on the court need to just be really locked in and competing and diving for those loose balls. It just means so much, especially tomorrow [in Game 2].”