Caitlin Clark Is Poised for a Huge Stretch Run
Caitlin Clark Is Poised for a Huge Stretch Run
She and the Indiana Fever have a lot of factors pointing to a strong finish.
When the WNBA gets underway again on Thursday after its month-long Olympic break, all eyes will once again be on Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever as they gear up for the final stretch of the regular season. And while Indiana is already currently in playoff position — the Fever hold the No. 7 seed, tied with the Chicago Sky at 3 games clear of the playoff cut-off — with a 96 percent chance to get in, there are reasons to think Clark and her team will head into the playoffs on an especially strong note.
Let’s run through some of those, one-by-one:
The opponents are easier
This is the most obvious way that Indiana is in for an easier time after the Olympic break. In terms of average opponent Elo rating — after adjusting for home-court advantage — Clark and the Fever will go from facing the league’s second-most difficult schedule before the break (only Atlanta’s slate was tougher) to facing the easiest schedule in the league afterward (by a wide margin).
As a result, no team will experience a greater softening of the opposition faced than the Fever — their negative shift in average Elo SOS is nearly double that of any other team — and that will, no doubt, make a material difference for Clark’s numbers.
The schedule is less of a grind
Even aside from the actual quality of the opponents faced, the Fever will also just face a far less demanding cadence of travel and games over the remainder of the regular season:
Indiana will go from playing only 44 percent of games at home before the break — the WNBA’s second-lowest share of home games — to the highest share of home games (62 percent) afterwards. And they’ll also go from playing on an average of 2.56 rest days per game — tied for the second-fewest in the league — to playing a game every 2.62 days over the rest of the season — the most rest of any team from here on out.
(This is the back end of a schedule that saw Indiana come out of the gates playing a game every 1.8 days in the first few weeks of the season, trying to get Clark on TV as much as possible right away — but potentially causing the team to run out of gas during its 3-10 start.)
Clark — and her teammates — are rapidly improving
The structural factors above are already going to give an advantage to the Fever from this point forward. But the team should also be better from an individual standpoint — and that all starts with Clark’s improvement.
Earlier in the season, I wrote about the reasons why advanced statistics like Estimated RAPTOR, Win Shares and Player Efficiency Rating weren’t as keen on Clark as her reputation or popularity would suggest. The TL;DR came down to subpar offensive efficiency, high turnovers, a surprisingly below-average 3-point percentage, weak defense and poor on-court impact metrics.
Clark hasn’t fixed all of those items quite yet — she still has 67 percent more turnovers than any other player in the WNBA, and her 3P% (.327) remains below the league average (.336). But in a broader sense, she has consistently improved her metrics throughout her rookie season. Here’s a plot of her cumulative 2024 Offensive and Defensive Estimated RAPTOR by week since I began calculating it in mid-June:
She still may not be as great in the offensive metrics as we’d think after she set a new single-game WNBA assist record (at 19) right before the break. But Clark has been on a clear upward trajectory as her rookie season has progressed — not unexpectedly based on the history of other highly drafted guards, who as a rule have taken longer to acclimate to the pros (as opposed to bigs, who seem to adapt faster). Combined with the less grueling schedule, Clark ought to have her best advanced statistical stretch of the season yet after the Olympic break.
And her teammates should provide more help, too. When I broke down Clark’s up-and-down early metrics, I also noted that her teammates were almost uniformly having very down years (most notably in the case of unanimous 2023 WNBA Rookie of the Year Aliyah Boston, whose RAPTOR had fallen off a cliff). Their numbers are still mostly down, but Clark’s most-used teammates — Kelsey Mitchell and Boston — are down a lot less than they were earlier in the year, while NaLyssa Smith and Erica Wheeler have kept things basically even.
The only veteran member of the Fever who hasn’t either closed the gap on her RAPTOR from last season or at least held steady is Kristy Wallace, whose numbers have slid even further since June. But otherwise, Indiana seems to be learning how to better play with Clark — and that improvement in chemistry as the season has progressed should stack on top of all the other factors above to make Caitlin Clark and the Fever a much scarier team down the stretch.
Filed under: WNBA