Indiana Fever star guard Caitlin Clark started her team’s scoring in Tuesday’s 99-89 playoff win against the Las Vegas Aces.
The shot was a three-pointer that got Clark in her groove, which led to one of her best offensive performances in recent memory. No. 22 finished the game with a team-high 27 points on 9-of-18 shooting from the field (5-of-11 from three-point range).
She also added 15 assists (11 of which came in the first half, which was the first time a player has tallied a points and assists double-double in one half in WNBA playoff history) and seven rebounds.
Clark spoke with the media after the game and explained how that first shot came together.
“Well, obviously, we diagram the first play in the locker room. And Steph told everybody I was gonna make it. So, I was just trying to not let everybody down, cause we were all visualizing that I was gonna make it. I needed to get the night started off right,” Clark said with a laugh, per Robin Lundberg of Indiana Fever on SI.
This display of confidence in Clark that White showed by drawing up the game’s first play for her feels significant, given the chatter swirling around the two of them after Game 1.
Clark and White sat next to each other in the postgame press conference after that disappointing defeat and were blunt about what went wrong. White was critical of the turnovers (Clark had six in that game), and Clark emphasized that nothing the Fever were trying to do on offense was working.
Some took these comments as the two taking digs at each other and tried to use them as proof that there’s a growing rift between the head coach and her star player.
But that was certainly not the case on Tuesday and both White and Clark have said countless times that they don’t care about whatever outside noise there is about the state of their relationship.
White showed all the confidence in Clark by drawing up that opening play for her, and it paid dividends not just for Clark’s confidence but in setting Indiana’s tone for the evening.
That was a smart move that not only speaks volumes about what the Fever can do to start Game 3 on Thursday, but further proves White’s belief in her best player.
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