The Indiana Fever will look to extend a five-game winning streak when they travel south to face the slumping Dallas Wings on Thursday at the American Airlines Center, the Wings’ home away from home.
The Fever (24-12) have won 10 of their past 12 contests and remain in third place, a half-game ahead of Las Vegas in the league standings. Indiana has sandwiched five-game winning streaks around a pair of losses, and the most recent run includes a 98-87 home victory over Dallas on Friday.
Since then, the Fever has earned two wins, both on the road, against Atlanta in overtime on Sunday and over Toronto on Tuesday. In that latest win, Indiana got 29 points from Kelsey Mitchell and 24 from Caitlin Clark. Fellow starter Aliyah Boston added 16 points and Sophie Cunningham finished with 13 points off the bench in the victory.
Mitchell’s production on Tuesday set the WNBA single-season record for her 20th consecutive game with 20 or more points. A’ja Wilson of Las Vegas had a 20-game streak, but not in a single season.
“She just can get a shot at any time,” Fever coach Stephanie White said of Mitchell, who made 11 of her 16 shots Tuesday. “It’s nice to know that you can give her the ball and let her go to work. There aren’t a lot of players that can just create the kinds of shots that she does.”
Tuesday’s win was also the 16th time this year that Clark and Mitchell each scored at least 20 points in the same game, which established another league mark.
Thursday’s contest is the third of a season-high five-game road trip for Indiana.
The Wings (20-16) have dropped two straight and seven of their past nine, including a 78-70 loss in San Francisco to the Golden State Valkyries on Monday. Paige Bueckers led Dallas with a team-high 21 points, while Arike Ogunbowale added 17 and Alanna Smith hit for 13 points for the Wings, who played without Azzi Fudd (sore knee) for the fifth consecutive outing. The team announced Wednesday that Fudd, the No. 1 pick in this year’s WNBA Draft, will undergo arthroscopic surgery on her right knee early next week and miss the rest of the season.
“We just got to keep going game to game,” Ogunbowale said. “Not worry about how many we lost or how many we have left — game to game, our next opponent, and watch the film on what we did wrong and just be better for the next game.”
The Wings’ recent swoon has dropped them to eighth in the standings, but they are still 4 1/2 games ahead of ninth-place Portland for the final postseason spot with eight games to play. Dallas plays its next six games at home.
Dallas and Indiana have split their first two meetings this year, with the Wings winning on the road 107-104 in the season opener on May 9.
–Field Level Media
