INDIANAPOLIS — The night belonged to Caitlin Clark until, for five terrifying seconds, it nearly belonged to nobody. With the Indiana Fever clinging to a lead in the final moments of regulation, Clark turned the ball over, Skylar Diggins buried a game-tying three, and a game the Fever had controlled was suddenly headed to overtime with the building’s stomach in its throat. Then Aliyah Boston decided the extra five minutes would not be a coin flip.
Boston took over the overtime, and the Fever beat the Chicago Sky 114-106 at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in a Commissioner’s Cup game that was far closer than Indiana would have liked. The headline number belongs to Clark, who finished with 32 points, 10 assists and seven rebounds, a double-double that would normally be the whole story. On Thursday it was only the setup.
The closer was Boston. She finished with 34 points and 12 rebounds, a double-double of her own, and saved the heaviest lifting for the period that decided the game. After Clark’s late giveaway threatened to turn a comfortable evening into a collapse, Boston answered in overtime with the kind of interior dominance that does not show up in a highlight package but wins basketball games, scoring through contact and controlling the glass while the Sky ran out of answers.
The supporting math held up the stars. Kelsey Mitchell added 19, and the trio of Clark, Boston and Mitchell combined for 85 of Indiana’s 114 points, a concentration that worked on the night but hinted at the thinness underneath. The Fever were without Sophie Cunningham, sidelined by an elbow injury, and the absence narrowed the rotation at exactly the moment a 40-minute game stretched to 45.
Clark, as ever, made sure the night had its texture off the floor as well as on it. She played in a pair of Taylor Swift “Eras Tour” Nike Kobe 6 player-exclusives, OutKick reported, the kind of detail that travels further on social media than a box score ever will and that has become its own part of the Clark economy. Two years into her professional career, the shoes are news, which is both a measure of her reach and a small burden the rest of the league does not carry.
The Sky, for their part, did not lose this game so much as run out of road. Diggins’ tying three was the kind of shot that should steal a win, and Chicago’s refusal to fold turned what could have been a routine Indiana evening into a genuine scare. A team built around its own young core found enough to force overtime on the road and not quite enough to finish it, which is the story of a lot of good young teams in June.
What the night left unsettled is the thing the box score cannot resolve: whether a Fever team this dependent on three players can survive a postseason against opponents who will load up on Clark and dare the rest to beat them. On Thursday the answer was Boston, and it was emphatic. Whether it holds when the games matter more, and when Cunningham’s elbow and the rest of the rotation are tested by better teams, is the question Indiana will spend the summer trying to answer. For one overtime, at least, the answer was a center who refused to let her point guard’s mistake cost them the game.
