Kelsey Mitchell appears to be on a mission to prove that the longer her season lasts, the stronger she gets. On Tuesday, she’s out to give the Indiana Fever a commanding lead in the WNBA semifinals.
A finalist for the MVP award, Mitchell outplayed the actual MVP winner on Sunday to get a jump on A’ja Wilson and the Las Vegas Aces in Game 1 of the best-of-five series. Game 2 is in Las Vegas on Tuesday.
Mitchell scored 34 points in the 89-73 Game 1 victory at Las Vegas and will attempt to repeat that performance to help steal a second road game in the series before the matchup shifts to Indianapolis for Game 3 on Friday.
“Kelsey is just a tough shot-maker,” said Fever head coach Stephanie White. “She’s always in constant motion, she’s fast as all get out (and) probably the fastest player in the league with the ball in her hands. … There have been multiple times this season when she’s put us on her back.”
In four games so far in the playoffs, Mitchell has averaged 26.0 points on 48.6 percent shooting from the floor and 50.0 percent from 3-point range.
The eighth-year pro finished the regular season averaging a career-best 20.2 points per game. She averaged 21.2 points per game over the final 22 games of the season that Caitlin Clark missed with a groin injury and a bone bruise on her left ankle.
Odyssey Sims added 17 points in Game 1 while Natasha Howard had 12. Both Howard and Aliyah Boston delivered 11 rebounds.
The Indiana defense also left its mark. Wilson was held to 16 points, well under her WNBA-best average of 23.4 per game during the regular season. Wilson was 6 of 22 (27.2 percent) from the floor after shooting 50.5 percent in the regular season.
“We wanted to come in and be the aggressor right away to make sure we were dictating on the defensive end and dictating from a pace standpoint,” White said. “They’re champions for a reason and we knew they were going to make runs.”
After trailing by as many as 14 points, Las Vegas pulled within 58-55 with 2:51 remaining in the third quarter before Indiana closed the period on an 11-0 burst. Jackie Young had 19 points for the Aces while Dana Evans had 14. Wilson finished with 13 rebounds.
The Aces, though, do know how to make a statement after a tough loss. Las Vegas was thrashed 111-58 by the Minnesota Lynx on August 2 before finishing the regular season on a 16-game winning streak that included a revenge victory over the Lynx.
After the Aces saw their 17-game winning streak snapped in an 86-83 Game 2 loss in their best-of-three opening-round series against Seattle, they came back to advance with a 74-73 victory behind 38 points from Wilson.
“We were in the huddle (Sunday) talking about how we didn’t really have a pep to us,” Young said, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “You saw the pace that they were playing with and the pep that they had in their step. And we just didn’t have that. It’s on us to change that next game.”
–Field Level Media
