How the Dallas Wings took down the Indiana Fever in WNBA season-opener thriller

‘Caitlin Clark Effect’ shows up in bursts

She missed the butterflies. That’s what Clark said before Saturday’s game. The nervous churn in her gut that nevertheless tells her she’s ready to play. When the Fever star couldn’t do anything but watch through all her injury issues in 2025, there was too much calm where the storm should’ve been.

“There’s just like a different juice inside of your body when you’re putting on your uniform and you’re mentally locked in to go play a basketball game,” Clark said. “Obviously, I was excited for my teammates last year. One hundred percent. I was their biggest fan. But it’s not the same.”

Nor was she, at least for the first half of Saturday’s action. Clark followed a rousing welcome during pregame intros — it evoked the United Center crowd drowning out Michael Jordan’s name during his Chicago Bulls heyday — with a choppy first half. No 3-pointers. Two offensive fouls on obvious push-offs, the second a matter of total frustration with chest-to-chest defense. Shaky ball-handling. As time ran out before the break, Clark pounded the ball to the floor in frustration and voiced some sort of grievance to her head coach, Stephanie White.

Then? The Caitlin Clark Effect. As her vibe goes, everyone goes. Never mind the two early 3s she hit in the third quarter — her body language flipped, and so did the nine-point halftime deficit. She followed the second 3 with a massive fist pump. She exhorted the crowd twice while backpedaling on defense, and the increased volume from the audience had at least something to do with back-to-back Dallas turnovers. When the Wings called a timeout, Clark took another lap around the floor to stoke the fans some more. The score was 80-all to end the third quarter, with everyone in the building riding both Clark’s performance and her energy.

There will still be questions about how close to 100 percent health she is. At one point late in the fourth quarter, with the game very much in the balance, Clark had almost no burst to sprint back on defense and deter an easy Wings bucket. She didn’t hit a 3 in the last frame. She couldn’t get the one-on-one stop against Odyssey Sims with 35 seconds left, a score that gave Dallas a crucial five-point edge. Her clean look at a potential game-tying 3 with roughly six seconds left rimmed out. Mitchell, not Clark, was the Fever’s option on the final shot at the buzzer. Instead, one of the most explosive shooters in the history of the game was a decoy.

Simply having Clark available again for WNBA games is a victory on so many levels in the league’s 30th anniversary season. Clark’s final line (20 points on 7-of-18 shooting, seven assists, five turnovers) and the final score made it a bit of an anticlimax, too. — Brian Hamilton

This story will be updated.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Indiana Fever, Dallas Wings, WNBA

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