It’s over for now, but no professional sports team spent more time receiving and drawing attention to itself than did the Indiana Fever this season. The Fever has broken, the team eliminated by the defending champion Las Vegas Aces for the second straight season, but Indiana succeeded in being the WNBA’s canary in the coal mine, embodying both the obvious and unintended consequences of rapid growth, while also allowing themselves to be a season-long distraction: part-time professional basketball team, part-time right-wing culture war centerpiece. Less than a decade ago, Atlanta and Minneapolis were praised for their unified political stances. Today, Trumpism has replaced social justice as the defining characteristic of the league – and as the curtain closed on the 2026 WNBA regular season, Indiana stood at its epicenter.
The Fever were the most polarizing team in professional sports, known less for their basketball than their culpability in pulling the league from its old cultural identity as a Black/queer league into the current ugliness of the Magasphere – a calculated and dangerous path to popularity. There was the basketball of the WNBA, and then there was the Indiana Fever.
Their two most recognizable players, Caitlin Clark and Sophie Cunningham, were in a constant state of churn, always in the news, always embroiled against an other, symbolizing and pandering to America’s fractures. Their best and longest-tenured player, Kelsey Mitchell, hasn’t been able to concentrate fully on basketball the past two seasons as the Clark-Cunningham sideshow devours the oxygen and may end her time in Indiana that began as the second overall pick in 2018.
Clark remains the league’s biggest name and its chief avatar – mildly reluctant or willing pawn, but an avatar nevertheless. She is an avatar for the money at a time when broadcasters and venture capitalists are making their bets on women’s sports. She represented a certain type of hope, that the day had arrived where women’s team sports would enjoy the same visibility as female stars such as Serena Williams and Lindsey Vonn.
She was an avatar of weaponization, the speculator’s proof that the WNBA is doomed by its own hand for not recognizing her overall importance to its future, a future bizarrely framed as bright only if Clark succeeds – an odd framework for sports, where the final score and holders of the trophies determines who wins.
Most obviously and explosively, Clark was an avatar for whiteness, a Christian, hetero whiteness that holds the pervasive belief that it is straight, white America – already the overwhelming and unchallenged dominant cultural and financial force in this country – that is under assault. Any struggle Clark showed on the court – a foul call, a non-call – was treated as if it were an urban crime statistic, unmistakable proof that Black people had even turned basketball lawless. The opportunistic and racist White House and the Trump administration repeated this fiction. Republican members of Congress earlier this season insinuated Clark was being discriminated against by the league because she is white. The Congressmen threatened the WNBA with a Department of Justice investigation if the league did not take steps to protect her. Clark and the Fever did little to dispel the notion.
Whenever Clark did succeed, her partisans saw it as proof of how much better the league would be if only it stopped persecuting her. Through Clark, and how she navigated playing basketball in a league largely comprised of Black women – even as Breanna Stewart, Paige Bueckers and a host of other white women thrive without incident – was how the government (as well as many fans and journalists) framed the state of women’s professional basketball. She is half of what all the fuss has been about.
The other half is Cunningham, who spent much of the season building the scaffolding for her second act by driving a wedge into heart of the league, positioning herself at the center of the attention-fueled culture war against trans women, being the blonde, blue-eyed foil to the league’s unruly Black women, and providing an entry point for the bros, their money and misogyny to show up, for men such an Enes Kanter Freedom to do what they have always done to women’s sport – find a way to denigrate it and be rewarded with attention. While it was all very tired and calculating, framed as speaking her truth, designed to reach the very group of white male sports fans that have either criticized or ignored women’s sports but are now bringing their toxicity to the tent under the guise of “growth,” Cunningham has been the subject of more attention than she’s ever had in her decade-long career, with public appearances and lengthy profiles. She knows exactly to whom she is talking, and why.
The Fever carrying these burdens – or wearing them proudly until having to answer for them – is how Clark’s career has shifted from starting her first season a phenom joining a team that hadn’t had a winning season in seven years to ending her third in daily controversy, with her as the signature, aggrieved face of Maga’s team.
With the avatars mercifully tabled, Clark emerged as an excellent player with enormous upside and serious deficiencies. She is a volume scorer but not yet a great one – her career field-goal percentage is just 42.3, below the league average, and for all her dazzle, her career three-point percentage is a below-average 34.2. She shot 36.1% from three this season, below the Fever team average of 38.6%. She is an adept playmaker whose true skill may be less in creating offense for herself and more in controlling the tempo of the game and involving her teammates. She was second in the league in assists and first in turnovers, fitting considering she constantly has the ball – similar to James Harden in a way. She is an apathetic defender.
As a basketball presence, she is wholly unlikeable. She does not play the game with her teammates as much as beyond them – a common affliction of many superstars that in victory is touted as a virtue but looks selfish following first-round defeats. She does not appear to play the game with joy or intensity, but carries a childish outrage, not only confronting officials on virtually every trip downcourt, but sprinting to berate them in dead-ball situations. Clark plays with grievance, an entitled grievance that recalls the White House grievance, the same grievance shared by much of the white electorate that uncoincidentally claims her as their champion – they’re all unfairly under attack.
For all the criticism, WNBA officials have actually shown remarkable restraint toward her. She exaggerates most calls and outwardly flops on others to steal calls – call it European gamesmanship, but the true nature of flopping is to receive something undeserved and is the worst example of immoral basketball. Even during timeouts Clark finds a way to spar with someone, be it a cameraman or an assistant coach.
Like Cunningham, however, Clark has mastered the key component of the so-called attention economy – she sees to it the camera is always on her. A more professional Clark, with fewer outbursts and deeper concentration on basketball would lower the temperature on the league, her team, herself, and would probably win her more trips to the foul line – but there was virtually no evidence this season that is what she wants.
Superstar petulance is nothing new, and if Stephanie White doesn’t return as coach, it won’t be the first time a star player will be accused of getting the coach fired. Nor is it the first time a sports team has reflected a national political mood or been pulled into its vortex. Usually reflection marks triumph – Black and Jewish America loved the Dodgers because of Jackie Robinson and Sandy Koufax just as the Yankee teams of Tony Lazzeri, Frankie Crosetti, Joe DiMaggio, and Phil Rizzuto made them beloved in Italian-American homes.
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Teams have also symbolized division. In the 1980s, the Boston Celtics were often considered white America’s team because of Larry Bird, the high number of white players the Celtics routinely signed, and the perception that the Celtics did not play with the flamboyant Blackness that defined the rest of the league, which allowed white fans to see themselves in their no-nonsense, blue-collar ethic.
Despite the presence of James White, Dont’a Hightower, the McCourty twins and Stephon Gilmore, the late-stage Brady/Belichick Patriots were adopted by certain white supremacists because the Patriots were led offensively by a handful of white players – Tom Brady, Rob Gronkowski and Julian Edelman. The supposedly colorblind whites had found their ideal.
None of those examples, however, have existed within the combination of today’s dark political intensity where the federal government has positioned itself as the legal guardian of whiteness and the precarious political footing of the league. The nation has effectively closed its borders to everyone except white South Africans, while Cunningham encourages the right to use the WNBA for anti-trans fodder and the DOJ believes Clark needs its protection.
In a feeble attempt to distance itself from the obvious racism, the Fever periodically made bland, unconvincing statements – there’s no room for hate in the game – but their actions undermined their sentiments. Cunningham knows exactly who her fans view as the enemy, which fires to stoke on her podcasts, which dog whistles to sound. As does Clark, for her constant on-court histrionics elicit the right sympathy from the right people. They both know exactly what they’re doing.
The season over, the Fever closed 2026 not by celebrating their best record since 2015, or by marking the first time since the 2009-2012 season the franchise posted three-straight 20-win seasons and have momentum as a potential title contender, but with more grievance. General manager Amber Cox read a ridiculous, gaslighting statement blaming outside media for the odious reputation of Fever fans. “The attacks on our fan base have no basis in reality, and must stop,” she read from the podium. Mitchell’s own words painfully contradicted Cox, as did rival players around the league.
Maybe they just want it this way.
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