After being at the bottom of the barrel with Indiana, the eight-year veteran scored 34 points as the Fever shocked the Aces in Game 1.
LAS VEGAS — Kelsey Mitchell could have asked out, and no one would have blamed her. The Indiana Fever played in a barn at the Indiana State Fairgrounds, for goodness sakes. Players routinely leave organizations over lesser indiscretions.
But the rewards from sitting in the valley for years are now stacking into a mountaintop. This moment in her first WNBA semifinals is why you stay with an organization and endure.
Mitchell was the better MVP finalist on the home floor of freshly minted four-time winner A’ja Wilson at Michelob Ultra Arena on Sunday. Mitchell scored 34 points – the second most in franchise playoff history – to lead the Fever to an 89-73 Game 1 upset over the heavily favored Las Vegas Aces, putting the league’s hottest team on its heels as it looks to cement a dynasty.
All of it is a fresh feeling for Mitchell. And an emotional one. She never earned an All-Star vote, let alone an MVP one, until the arrivals of Caitlin Clark and Aliyah Boston. Heck, she rarely won games at all and still had never won in Las Vegas.
Until the time it mattered most.
“That’s the growth,” Mitchell said. “That's the experience, that's the being at the bottom of the barrel, that's the not being on anybody's radar and being a loser. So I've seen that. I know what that looks like.”
The eight-year veteran is the face of a team willing itself through the postseason on belief and resilience. No one thought the Fever would be here, not when Clark sustained multiple injuries and the number of unavailable players ballooned.
Defeating the No. 2-seeded Aces to serve court in the semifinals? Few outside of the organization were banking on that one. Yet while the Aces hinge heavily on their MVP, the Fever naturally came together around the arduous journey of their star.
“Kelsey Mitchell has been through the worst parts of this franchise, and she deserves to go through the best,” head coach Stephanie White said Saturday. “She's rising to the challenge.”
The Fever were a laughingstock with the benefit of the WNBA Draft Lottery and an inability to use it correctly. When they failed to build around Mitchell, 2018 No. 2 overall pick, their high-scoring star didn’t point fingers or bemoan her situation publicly. She didn’t sit out and demand a trade, or even hint at threatening to do so.
She handled it with grace, knowing this time would come.
It’s rare. This season alone, multiple players were granted trade requests or exits. The Fever paid out DeWanna Bonner, their headline free-agent signing, in June when the veteran sat out games and asked for a trade.
Sylvia Fowles, a 2025 Hall of Fame entrant, is perhaps the most well known W player to ask out when she sat out a season with the Chicago Sky. Fowles won with the Lynx in 2015 and added a fourth championship to the team’s dynasty in 2017.
But that doesn’t always pay off. Ask Tina Charles how ring-chasing turned out.
To be clear, Mitchell remembers the times she thought about a swift exit. The day before Game 1, she said she had a list of all the times she could have quit. Another of all the people who wrote her off, including coaches who didn’t want her around. A third for the media outlets and reporters who didn’t want to talk to her, a top-10 scorer since her third season buried in mediocrity.
Everyone clamored to talk to her and about her Sunday.
“Everyone deserves a Kelsey Mitchell on their team,” veteran reserve Brianna Turner said. “But they don’t get it, because we get her.”
It’s Mitchell’s team now, and she knows what it’s like to be in the shadows. She declined taking the podium Sunday, giving it instead to Turner and Odyssey Sims and later delivering glowing words about all of her teammates' efforts.
“I’m like, ‘Kelsey, talk your s***,’” Turner said. “You’re one of the best guards in this league.”
After that unfortunate spell from 2021-22 playing at the Indiana Farmers Coliseum while Gainbridge Fieldhouse underwent construction, Boston arrived in 2023 as the first leveling up of the Fever and Mitchell’s ascension.
Mitchell acknowledged that summer the reason more people wanted to talk to her was about the new No. 1 pick in town. It then exploded when Clark arrived. She minded, but she stayed her course.
“[I’m] always on the side of being part of the solution [rather] than the problem,” Mitchell said that summer.
It earned her first semifinal victory in another year no one thought the Fever could.
Category: General Sports
