Indianapolis has been the center of the basketball world in 2024, hosting NBA All-Star Weekend, early round NCAA men’s basketball tournament games and an Indiana Pacers conference final run. Could it be that Caitlin Clark and the WNBA Indiana Fever are the biggest show of them all? Following her second home game as a member of the Indiana Fever on Monday, here is an accounting of the experience at her home opener last Thursday and a comparison to the Pacers playoff game the following night.
The first thing one noticed upon arrival to Gainbridge Fieldhouse Thursday was the sheer ubiquitousness of the number 22. Whether on the jerseys of the Fever or Iowa Hawkeyes, Clark’s number was well represented among the fans in attendance. So too was Clark well-represented in the team store, with any number of shirts referencing her specifically. If there were any jerseys referencing other players on the team, they were not easy to spot.
It was a lively atmosphere, as one would expect. There is little that compares to All-Star Weekend, an NBA carnival in which former greats are in excess supply. Even in the frozen tundra of mid-February Indianapolis, All-Star weekend was the kind of all-encompassing civic takeover that no single game can replicate. There is also little that compares to an NBA playoff victory to keep one’s season alive, which the fans of Indianapolis experienced Friday night. Yet Clark’s Fever debut Thursday had its own kind of energy, and an electricity that at times approached the playoff atmosphere at the same location just 24 hours later.
Indeed, the similarities between this particular regular season WNBA game and an NBA playoff game were greater than one might expect. To begin with, both were sellouts of 17,274. There was undoubtedly more energy in the building on Friday than on Thursday, though one imagines that the game results — Indiana beating New York in the NBA and getting smoked by New York in the WNBA — had a little to do with it. Even so, the roar of the crowd was nearly as loud on Thursday as it was on Friday, at least on the few occasions when the Fever merited such a reaction.
The roar for Clark’s first basket — her only points of the first half — was considerable, but matched not long after by a shot-clock beating three by Katie Lou Samuelson and a scuffle between Jonquel Jones and Aaliyah Boston. In fact, the crowd was at a fever pitch (pardon the pun) for nearly every Indiana basket. As should be no real surprise in Indianapolis, whose franchise made three WNBA Finals and won one before Clark ever stepped foot at Iowa, the fans’ appreciation extended beyond a single player.
Yet it would be a mistake to downplay the ‘Clark effect.’ Those first half roars reached a crescendo when she began to heat up in the third quarter and the lead trimmed — if ever briefly — to a manageable 11. During that second half rally, it became clear that for as much energy as the crowd had in the first half, it was only Clark’s poor start that was keeping the roof on the building.
Clark’s fairly underwhelming first half (three fouls and two points) cast less of a pall over the proceedings than New York’s obvious superiority. Take the excitement over Clark out of the picture, and this was a matchup of the defending Eastern Conference champions — a superteam by any definition — against a team that has spent most of this era mired in last place. (Indiana played New York tough once last season, with an Aaliyah Boston game-tying shot capping a late flurry to force overtime, but these teams simply are not of equivalent quality.) One of the biggest roars of the night was for a steal and transition opportunity that ended in a blown Fever lay-up.
To be sure, the frenzied peak of the Fever game on Thursday was sustained throughout Friday’s Knicks-Pacers Game 6. Yet the fact that the atmospheres were at any point comparable is itself a milestone for the WNBA. Thursday’s game looked and felt like a major league event, and while one could spot a few empty seats here and there, even the highest levels of the upper deck were well-populated — all for a franchise that, had Tamika Catchings not led them to the WNBA Finals in 2009, could well have folded amidst the recession.
(To say the least, both games provided a more exciting atmosphere than February’s NBA All-Star Game, when the roars from the crowd were limited to Tyrese Haliburton’s flurry of threes at the start.)
It should be noted that exiting the Fever game was far easier than navigating the sea of gold following the Pacers’ win on Friday, though again much of that can be attributed to the vastly different results of the two games.
Though the Pacers are bigger in Indianapolis, they occupy a lower rung on the NBA hierarchy than the Fever do in the WNBA. As evidenced by ESPN’s New York-heavy coverage of their Game 7 win on Sunday, the sixth-seeded Pacers are not a national favorite. When asked by this writer after Game 6 about the national exposure his team would receive in Game 7, Haliburton spoke of earning the spotlight: “When you’re a young, up and coming team, it’s easy to be like ‘man, we’re never on TV, people never get to see us play.’ Well, you’ve got to earn it. … That stuff is earned, not given, and we have to prove that we deserve that spotlight.”
The Clark-era Fever are a noted exception to that rule. Clark played her fourth game on Monday with each airing on a national platform (ABC, ESPN, ESPN2 and Amazon Prime), part of a 40-game regular season that includes 36 national appearances. In the WNBA, Indiana is the Knicks, Lakers, and Warriors combined. It is almost certain that the Pacers have never played as many games on national TV as the Fever will this season.
Locally, the Pacers’ conference final run will inevitably take precedence over even the most compelling regular season story. With their season extended at least a week, it may take a bit more time before Clark has her new city’s undivided attention. In the meantime, the Fever are keeping pace.
