The Atlanta Dream beat the Indiana Fever 108-101 on Thursday in Indianapolis, turning an early-season meeting between two title contenders into the kind of game that felt too important to waste. The Fever erased a 13-point deficit and tied it late, but Atlanta answered with a 13-6 run to leave with the road win.
Caitlin Clark had more than a scoreline to watch. She debuted her Nike signature shoe, the Caitlin 1, on the court a day after publicly announcing it, and the attention around her feet matched the attention around the game itself.
The result mattered because it snapped Indiana's four-game winning streak and gave Atlanta a response to a double-digit loss two weeks ago, when the Fever held the Dream to their fewest points of the season. This time, the pace held, the crowd stayed in it, and both teams played like they knew they may see each other again when the stakes get higher.
Angel Reese led Atlanta with 21 points and 11 rebounds, while Rhyne Howard added 16 points, six assists and five rebounds. The Fever got another heavy lift from Kelsey Mitchell, who scored 26 points and became the eighth player in WNBA history to reach 700 career 3-pointers, and Clark matched her with 26 points and seven assists. Aliyah Boston added 23 points and eight rebounds, but Indiana still allowed a season-high 108 points and lost despite scoring 100 or more for the third time this year.
The late swing told the story. Sophie Cunningham's reverse layup pulled Indiana level with 5:08 left, but Atlanta had already seen enough pressure to know what came next. Karl Smesko said the more a team plays in playoff-intensity games with that kind of edge, the more comfortable it becomes in those moments, and Thursday looked like the first proof of that.
The teams meet again Saturday in Atlanta at 1 p.m. ET on ABC, and the rematch now carries a sharper question than the first one did: whether the Fever can absorb that kind of run when the game tightens for good.
