How Caitlin Clark got 'the whole perspective' with Fever coaches while out with injury

Indianapolis Star

a day ago

INDIANAPOLIS — Caitlin Clark found she had a lot to learn in her three-week stint of watching her Indiana Fever from the bench.
Clark, the Fever's star point guard and reigning WNBA Rookie of the Year, strained her quad May 24 in a loss to the New York Liberty. She was ruled out for a minimum of two weeks — the first time she has been out for an extended period in both her collegiate and professional career.
So, for the first time in five years, she found herself on the bench as her teammates took the court.
Despite her frustration around being injured for the first time in her career, the time off helped Clark slow down, in a way. Without needing to think about the direct next action on the court, needing to find the best shot or assist an open teammate, she could look at everything with a different perspective.
'When you're in the game and you have the ball in your hands, you're thinking about so many different things,' Clark said. 'You're trying to dribble, you're trying to drive, you're trying to pass, you're looking for your teammates, you're thinking about shooting. So it's hard to really, you know, look at the game from the whole perspective of everybody on the floor. And I think that's a lot easier when you're out.'
Even on the bench, too, she wasn't just watching. Her coaching staff still put her to work.
Clark sat directly next to the coaching staff during the five games she was out, assisting in note-taking and tracking different trends, including stops and shots.
'I think she notices trends a little bit more,' Fever coach Stephanie White said of what Clark learned on the bench. 'You know, we had her keep track of some stuff on the sideline. One of the things, especially as a point guard, is to understand when we've gone three or four possessions and we haven't got a high-quality shot, or they've gone three or four possessions and scored and we haven't been able to answer it.'
That was the goal for the Fever's coaching staff: give Clark a unique perspective of the game, something she hasn't been able to see in her five years of high-level basketball.
'She's starting to recognize some of those things, starting to recognize mismatches, switches, how defenses are playing us, because you can see it differently from the sideline, then you see it and sense it on the floor,' White said. 'So just having an opportunity to sit back for the last three and see that, I think it's going to help her once she gets back on the floor.'
Indiana went 2-3 in the five games that Clark was out, and each had staggering differences in how the Fever played. There were a couple games that they seemed to click (with the help of hardship player Aari McDonald), including a 27-point win over the Chicago Sky. But Indiana struggled finding a rhythm without Clark, playing a disjointed form of offense in their losses.
Something that hung over the Fever the entire time that Clark was out, too, was that they struggled to keep the up-tempo pace that Clark is known for. The Fever couldn't push the pace in transition without Clark, and that led to a more predictable offense that was easier to defend.
These were all things that Clark, taking notes on the bench, noticed. And she hopes, even with returning to the court and having everything else running through her mind, that she can take everything into consideration when she returns.
'I think, for us as a whole group, there's certain things in games that we have to be able to see a little bit faster and earlier in the games, depending on how they're guarding us, how they're guarding certain actions, things we're doing in coverage that maybe aren't working,' Clark said. 'And how can we manipulate that? How can we put people in certain screening actions to get exactly what we want?'
Chloe Peterson is the Indiana Fever beat reporter for IndyStar. Reach her at [e-mail] or follow her on X at @chloepeterson67.