Caitlin Clark walked into her pre-game media session on Thursday carrying a week’s worth of noise. Stephanie White, a two-game skid, days of speculations bout her body language, and, of course, the viral article that the organization’s senior advisor shared, everything stacked up since the Fever’s blowout loss in Portland.
So when reporters asked her how she was holding up, Clark didn’t sidestep it. She tried to answer it as honestly and clearly as she could.
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Clark started off by saying she’s had a sheer number of ‘check-ins’ in the past few days. “A lot of people called me and asked me how I am. And I was like, what do you mean? Oh, great,” she said. “I think a lot of self-reflection for everybody. Like, you look at yourself in the mirror, and you find ways to get better. That’s certainly what I did.
She pointed to a piece of advice that’s stuck with her, one she’d been talking through with a reporter a day earlier. “Everything is a two-day story. People are just gonna move on to the next, whether you play good, whether you play bad,” she said.
Even a win, in her framing, can’t move the needle too far. “We can’t get too high. We have New York on Saturday, or whatever day that is. I don’t care about that. For us, it’s gonna take a day at a time.”
She was pretty direct about which aspects of all of this negativity really affect her.
“Personally, I’m doing great. I don’t really read that stuff,” Clark said. “I know everybody can have an opinion, and people make me aware… But I’m not sitting on Twitter or social media reading those things.”
The circle that actually matters to her stays small. It comprises her teammates, her locker room, the front office, her friends, and her family. She says she likes to keep it all a little light. Her past week was spent playing Catan, Scrabble, having dinner with friends, and watching Game 1 of the NBA Finals. In her words, it “was pretty fun.”
However tough the week may have been for Clark, the Indiana Fever didn’t let it drag on the floor.
The franchise held a team meeting on Monday to clear the air on all the controversies, followed by the team putting on its stiffest defensive showing of the season. They held Atlanta Dream to a 34.3% from the field and 29% from three in an 83-71 win to open their Commissioner’s Cup title defense.
The win moved the Fever to 5-4, dropping Atlanta to 6-3. Clark stepped up to stuff the stat sheet with 17 points, 8 assists, and 7 rebounds in 31 minutes. Of course, none of it came easily. She threw up at halftime, later chalking it up to feeling a little sick after some applesauce that refused to stay down.
In the third quarter, she drilled a step-back 3-pointer over Atlanta’s Allisha Gray to swing the lead back to Indiana. She briefly posed for her fans and ran back on defense.
The night also seemed to close the book, for now, on the Clark-White drama. After feeding Kelsey Mitchell for a layup that forced an Atlanta timeout, Clark and her coach chest-bumped near the bench, both grinning. “I could’ve hurt her, honestly,” Clark joked.
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“She’s fiery and competitive. She shows passion, too, and she hypes her players up, and we were both just hyped. … I wouldn’t want to play for a coach that’s just stoic.”
CC’s shooting is still catching up to the rest of her game. Clark went 6-of-17 from the field and just 2-of-8 from deep against Atlanta.
