Clark has endured three separate injuries this season.
Despite moments of brilliance -- such as the Commissioner's Cup final victory over the Minnesota Lynx earlier this month -- the Indiana Fever have not quite met expectation in 2025.
A reworked squad built around the shooting and playmaking of Caitlin Clark entered the season with championship hype. But entering the All-Star break, the Fever sit sixth in the overall standings with a 12-11 record -- and Clark has missed half the season with unexpected injury problems.
A player known nearly as well for her spotless injury record as she is for her 3-point shot, it has been jarring for fans to watch the Fever without Clark -- who has missed 11 of Indiana's 24 games this season. Clark's latest injury, a right groin tweak, cost her Wednesday's game against the New York Liberty and has put her participation in the All-Star Game -- in which she is one of two team captains -- up in the air.
MORE: How long is Caitlin Clark out? Groin injury timeline, return date, latest updates on Fever star
Following the Clark-less Fever's 98-77 loss to the Liberty on Wednesday, Indiana head coach Stephanie White was asked about Clark's stop-start season. White offered an explanation as to why Clark has had so many injury struggles: the physicality that the star point guard faces each game.
"Someone who has the ball in her hands as much as Caitlin, the physicality that she's experiencing for 40 minutes, it causes you to load differently. It causes you to explode differently. It causes you to accelerate and decelerate differently," White said. "It's not the free-flowing movement that we want to see."
White's comments come months after Clark displayed a noticeably more-muscular figure after an offseason of bulking up, seemingly in response to the physicality she faced in her rookie season. Coming out of the All-Star break, White and the Indiana coaching staff will have to find a way to free up Clark to return to her dominant best -- as much to arrest her declining statistics (37 percent on field goals, 28 percent on 3-point attempts) as to keep her healthy.
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Category: Basketball
