Christie Sides has a Fever and the only prescription is more effort.
Indiana’s coach benched Caitlin Clark and three other starters for the final 14-plus minutes of Monday’s 89-72 loss to the Sun, according to the Indianapolis Star, before blasting them for their defense.
Clark played a career-low 22 minutes in the blowout loss.
“I’m gonna start with — you can’t, at this level, coach effort,” Sides said after the Fever fell to 3-10. “I thought we were just trying to ask them to keep playing hard. You can’t start there, you can’t play in this league if you have to coach effort. It’s just too hard.”
Sides benched Clark with 4:41 left in the third quarter after watching her team fall behind by 27 points in another Matador-esque defensive performance.
Indiana allowed Connecticut to shoot 46.2 percent from the field and 47.1 percent from 3.
Monday’s showing continued what has been a brutal display from the Fever this season, with Indiana providing about as much defensive resistance to opponents as a group of folding chairs.
Indiana allows a league-worst 89.8 points per game on a league-best 46.5 field goal percentage to go along with the worst team defensive rating at 111.7.
The individual metrics aren’t any kinder.
Eight of Indiana’s qualified players rank in the bottom of the league in defensive rating, including Clark, who ranks 126th among 140 players.
Clark’s defensive struggles have been cited as a reason why she is not viewed as the top rookie by advanced statistics despite leading first-year players in points.
The Fever will try — the imperative word — to play defense in their next game Thursday vs. Atlanta.
“(The Sun are) a team you can’t come out and be lackadaisical against, like they’re just that good, they’re going to punch you in the mouth and I don’t think we had it from the jump,” said Clark, who was mocked by Sun star Dijonai Carrington for embellishing contact. “Obviously, that’s a little disappointing, but that’s something they can’t coach. Effort is something they can’t coach, they can coach x’s and o’s, but they can’t coach that.
“I thought we just could have played with a lot better energy. I thought we let little things on the offensive end frustrate us and we didn’t play good defense. Everything they got was easy. Nothing was challenged, uncontested 3’s, we were giving up and-ones, we put them at the free-throw line. That was the key to this game, you can’t foul this team, they lead the league in free-throw attempts and that’s exactly what I did.
“That’s not a recipe to win many games.”