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Lynx Struggle Against Fever, Reeve Pulls Starters Early
INDIANAPOLIS — The warmup shirts told the story before the box score did.
Kayla McBride and Courtney Williams walked off the Gainbridge Fieldhouse floor on Tuesday night still fully zipped up, still in warmups, as if the second half had never really happened for them. It hadn’t. Cheryl Reeve never sent her All-Star backcourt — or most of her core — onto the floor after halftime.
Minnesota’s shot at locking up the No. 1 seed was on the line. The Lynx trailed by 23 at the break. They would fall by 19, 96-77, to an Indiana Fever team that smelled blood early and never let the game breathe.
For a group that has spent the year selling itself on defense and edge, this was something else entirely.
“It’s embarrassing,” Napheesa Collier said flatly. “We should be disappointed and embarrassed about the product that we put on the floor tonight. Not proud of what we did.”
Lynx fold early, Reeve pulls the plug
The warning signs flashed before tipoff. Olivia Miles, the dynamic rookie who leads Minnesota in points and assists and is widely expected to win Rookie of the Year, was scratched roughly 90 minutes before the game. A left calf issue turned her from questionable to unavailable after pregame testing with trainers. Reeve said she’ll likely be another game-time call on Thursday.
Still, the Lynx walked in knowing what was at stake: win, and the No. 1 seed was theirs.
Instead, they were swamped.
Indiana ran out to a 31-16 lead after the first quarter, slicing through a defense that had been the backbone of Minnesota’s season. The Fever poured in 57 points by halftime, finally looking like an offense that didn’t have to lean solely on Caitlin Clark and Kelsey Mitchell to manufacture everything.
Reeve saw enough.
Down big, on the road, with the playoffs looming and the game clearly slipping away, she chose preservation over a miracle chase. Collier, McBride, Williams and Natasha Howard never left the bench in the second half. The white flag went up with 20 minutes still on the clock.
Minnesota would get its top seed anyway — not from anything it did in Indianapolis, but from a result 2,000 miles away. Later Tuesday night, the Portland Fire beat the Golden State Valkyries 90-82 in overtime, handing the Lynx the No. 1 spot by proxy.
Reeve didn’t sound particularly moved by that detail.
She made it clear she’s not hung up on bracket math, calling the Lynx a “damn good road team” and brushing aside the seeding chatter. The problem, in her eyes, was something more fundamental: how they’re playing.
Talk of edge, no sign of it
On Tuesday morning, McBride had talked about attitude. Not schemes. Not tweaks. A mindset.
She wanted an “F you” approach, the kind of snarling, ruthless edge that takes games by the throat — “ripping people’s hearts out, and taking momentum back,” as she put it.
That version of the Lynx never appeared.
“Well, that’s not my version of ‘F you,’” Reeve said afterward. “So, we’ll maybe discuss that. Like, what does that mean to you? And so that would be great that maybe that might exist on Thursday.”
The disconnect showed up on every defensive rotation. Indiana got what it wanted, when it wanted it. The Fever, who have spent long stretches this season living off Clark’s playmaking and Mitchell’s shot-making, looked whole again.
Clark was the engine and the accelerant, finishing with 27 points, nine assists, seven rebounds and four steals — a stat line that underlined how completely she controlled the game’s tempo. Mitchell added 20, extending her WNBA record with her 27th straight game of at least 20 points.
The pressure finally told inside as well. Fever coach Stephanie White had been pushing hard to get Aliyah Boston out of her recent slump. On this night, Boston answered with 17 points, seven rebounds, three assists and two steals, the kind of assertive, all-court performance Indiana has been waiting to see again.
“We’re scary when we’re clicking,” Clark said. “Like, we’re the best offensive team in the league, and we’ve shown moments where we can be really good defensively. I feel very confident in everything and everybody that we have in this locker room, and I think for us it’s just finding a level of consistency.”
The win guaranteed Indiana no worse than the No. 6 seed. When the Las Vegas Aces won later in the night, the Fever’s ceiling was set at No. 4.
Reserves fight, starters sit, message lands
Minnesota’s reserves did what they could to drag the scoreline back to respectability. Chloe Bibby came off the bench and led the Lynx with 15 points, giving the game a jolt that had been missing from the opening tip. Collier finished with nine, Williams with just two, and McBride never scored.
For a team that has now dropped four of its last five — its worst run of the season — the contrast between starters and reserves was stark.
Bibby didn’t sugarcoat it, saying they needed “a little bit punch in the face.” The game in Indianapolis felt exactly like that.
Collier spoke to the team in the locker room afterward.
“I said something,” she acknowledged. “We know that what we did was unacceptable. I emphasized how proud I was of the group that came in and got us back to the game.
“I’m very proud of what they did, but we let them down tonight. So we apologize for that, and we just talked about like these things cannot happen. We had just met about the things we want to get done in the postseason, and we didn’t do any of those things.”
Same teams, new stakes
The schedule offers no time to sit with the sting. The same matchup comes again on Thursday, this time in Minneapolis.
Indiana arrives with a clearer sense of who it is and what its offense can be when Boston joins Clark and Mitchell as a third pillar. Minnesota walks in as the freshly crowned No. 1 seed, but also as a team searching for the identity it spent months building and the edge it keeps talking about.
The Lynx got the seed they wanted. Now they have to prove they still deserve the fear that usually comes with it.
