Caitlin Clark made sure to say thank you after the Indiana Fever‘s 92-75 Sunday win over the Seattle Storm.
Early in the third quarter, Clark slapped the stanchion after missing a 3-pointer. Clark was assessed a technical foul.
It’s Clark’s fifth technical foul of the season and puts Clark two technical fouls away from the WNBA’s mandated one-game suspension at seven technical fouls.
Clark discussed the sequence after the Fever’s win over the Storm had gone final.
I’m a big fan of Caitlin Clark because of things like this.
She’s such a competitor and she draws motivation from everything. Even a ref giving her a technical! 😂 😂😂#WelcometotheW pic.twitter.com/CN5eHXYOSo
— Lee K. Howard ☀️ (@HowardWKYT) August 19, 2024
“Well, I got a technical for basically being mad at myself, because I missed a three and then I went and hit the backboard and he told me it was disrespectful to the game of basketball, so I don’t know. It reminded me of the technical that I got in college where I said damn it where it’s like a personal frustration.
“It had nothing to do with my team, it had nothing to do with the reffing, it had nothing to do with the other team. It was just because I’m a competitor and I felt like I should have been making more shots.
Afterwards, though, Clark was giving thanks for the tech.
“But, I think he fired me up to continue to play a lot harder. I thought we got a lot better after he did that, so I want to thank him for that. Overall, I thought once we got to that media timeout around five minutes in the third quarter, I thought we all kind of just took a breath.
“It was a little chaos there for two and a half minutes and I think I could have done a better job of kind of regaining my cool. That’s like the fire and passion that just gets me going. It’s just finding a way to channel and use that and I thought I did a really good job of that at the end of the third and the fourth quarter,” Clark said.
Clark and the Fever did find another gear after the technical foul.
Clark finished 5-for-6 shooting from that point forward, including knocking down a pair of 3-pointers. She added six more assists, a trio of rebounds and a pair of blocked shots.
Clark finished with 23 points, nine assists, five rebounds, two blocked shots and one steal in the contest and shot 9-for-19 from the field. The 6-foot rookie guard tracked down two pieces of history in the win, too.
Clark overtook Ticha Penicheiro as the WNBA’s all-time single-season rookie assists leader and Clark broke Tamika Catchings’ rookie Fever record for made 3-pointers in a season.
As a team, Indiana rolled away from Seattle in the fourth quarter, outscoring the Storm 33-17 to secure one of the biggest wins of the season.
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