Doyel: Fever star Kelsey Mitchell having best possible season at worst possible time
INDIANAPOLIS – It’s an hour before tipoff, and Indiana Fever star Kelsey Mitchell is signing autographs for patrons of the CareSource Courtside Club at Gainbridge Fieldhouse. If you’ve never seen the Courtside Club, it looks like this before a game: Fans sitting at tables near the tunnel leading from the Fever locker room to the court, no walls, nothing to separate them from the WNBA players and coaches constantly walking past – and now it’s Mitchell walking past and Fever fans are ignoring their burgers and chicken tenders to call out:
Kelsey, Kelsey…
A few fans are shouting something else, three letters you’ll hear on occasion during a Fever game in Downtown Indianapolis:
MVP, MVP…
“Kelsey!” shouts one girl, maybe 10 years old, holding an MVP sign. “Please!”
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You don’t have to beg Kelsey Mitchell. The 5-7 guard has been a high-scoring Indiana Fever ambassador since being selected No. 2 overall in the 2018 WNBA Draft, a mixture of goodwill and great basketball in the template of Tamika Catchings. She’s stopping for the little girl with the MVP sign, for the two older women with the chicken tenders, for everyone. She’s signing autographs. She’s posing for selfies. She’s smiling, big and sincere.
This is her moment. This is her night. This is her season, whether you’ve noticed or not. The guess here: You’ve not.
That’s the story I’m here to write: Kelsey Mitchell is having the best season of her WNBA All-Star career, by far, but the noise around this team is drowning it out.
That’s the reason, the only reason, I’m at this particular WNBA game. After all the hysteria of this season, much of it directed nationally at our team locally, I’m here to give Kelsey Mitchell her flowers. So I’m in the tunnel near the Courtside Club, near the Fever locker room, watching Mitchell interact with fans.
Then, movement from the opposite direction.
Here comes Fever coach Stephanie White, walking down the hall. She’s reading from a sheet of paper, notes she’s written to herself. She enters the interview room for her regularly scheduled pregame news conference. I’m not following White into the room – I’m here to write about Kelsey Mitchell, remember – so I’m not there when White sits down in front of the cameras and starts to talk.
“This isn’t for people in this room,” White says. “This is for an online community trying to create narratives that simply don’t exist…”
And just like that, the Kelsey Mitchell story can wait.
Again.
Until right now.
Doyel from that night: Breaking point for Stephanie White, turning point for WNBA?
Fever star Kelsey Mitchell’s shocking career season
This is Kelsey Mitchell’s ninth year in the WNBA, and professional athletes don’t do what she’s doing. Not this deep into their career. Not at age 30. They don’t have their best season, by far, but here’s Mitchell rewriting her own history, not to mention some lines in the Fever and WNBA record book.
Mitchell came into the 2026 WNBA season averaging 17.4 points per game for her career, first in the Fever record book, and is scoring nearly 40% more this season at 24.2 ppg. That’s second in the WNBA, behind Las Vegas’ A’ja Wilson (26.1 ppg).
It’s how often the points are coming – and how efficiently. Mitchell also is enjoying career-best accuracy across the board: 50.3% FG overall, 43.7% on 3’s, 84.7% at the line.
Her consistency has been staggering: at least 20 points in the last 19 games, a WNBA single-season record and one short of Wilson’s all-time mark of 20 set across the 2023 and ’24 seasons. She has scored in double figures in 50 consecutive games dating to last season, a franchise record and tied for 13th in WNBA history. With 27 games this season of at least 20 points, she’s fourth in WNBA single-season history with nine games left starting Tuesday night at Toronto.
These are the numbers I’m sharing with Mitchell, after all the shouts of Kelsey, Kelsey and the MVP, MVP from fans at the Courtside Club. And I’m asking her: How? How are you having this kind of season … now? She’s smiling. She appreciates the question, the interview request, the attention. And not in that way some people appreciate – no, crave – attention.
No, Mitchell is grateful simply because she’s considerate. Like, this considerate:
I tell her that, in another world, I’d been living in Cincinnati when she was a high school player there, she and her fraternal twin sister Chelsea leading Princeton High to the 2014 Ohio state championship as seniors – Kelsey was named Most Outstanding Player of tournament, and MVP of the title game – before going to Ohio State together.
Kelsey Mitchell graduated from Ohio State in 2018 with 3,402 career points, the No. 2 scorer in women’s basketball history and No. 3 all-time – male or female – behind only LSU’s Pete Maravich (3,667) and Washington’s Kelsey Plum (3,527). Chelsea was 4 inches taller, a forward whose career went sideways when she suffered a torn ACL before their freshman season at Ohio State.
I ask Kelsey about Chelsea. She smiles huge.
“She’s working now in Cincinnati,” Kelsey says. “Thank you for asking.”
Considerate, like that. Passionate about her craft, too. This is what she says, when I ask how she’s elevated her performance so much at age 30.
“You can’t accomplish great things, especially at this point in your career, without giving a damn,” she says. “I think you have to care, you have to have this passion for it. I like to think that’s what I portray every time I step on the floor, win, lose or draw, whether I have 1,000 points or zero.”
On the Fever’s basketball-reference.com page, which lists franchise leaders in 30 categories, Mitchell makes the Top 20 in all but four of them – and 18 times, the list doesn’t go farther than two names before getting to Kelsey Mitchell (No. 1 is almost always Catchings).
Similarly, the WNBA’s basketball-reference.com page for the 2026 season lists league leaders in 45 categories. Mitchell makes the Top 10 in 19 of them, and is among the best of the best in offensive win shares (first, 4.7), points per game (second) and 3-point accuracy (fourth). One year after earning first-team All-WNBA honors, Mitchell has become a legitimate MVP contender.
Which makes it all the more weird what happened last week when USA Women’s Basketball announced its 12-player Team USA roster for the 2026 FIBA World Cup, scheduled for later this month in Berlin. Just a few days after Mitchell had been named the WNBA Player of the Month for July, and more than halfway into Mitchell’s current 19-game heater, scoring at least 20 in every game with shooting splits 51.8% (FG), 48.9% (3FG) and 86% (FT), USA Basketball unveiled the names…
…and left hers off the list.
This is Kelsey Mitchell’s season, as I said, whether you – or USA Basketball – has noticed it or not.
Ask Mitchell about her omission from a team that includes two teammates (Aliyah Boston and Caitin Clark) and her head coach (White), and this is what you get: Grace. Consideration. Wisdom. That’s the Kelsey Mitchell package, right there.
Related: Why Indiana Fever’s Kelsey Mitchell was left off USA Basketball roster
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Indiana Fever’s Kelsey Mitchell: WNBA MVP?
Kelsey Mitchell wasn’t snubbed by USA Women’s Basketball overall, or by managing director Sue Bird directly. That’s what Mitchell wants you to know. It’s what she believes. Most players named to the 2026 team attended every Team USA camp possible, building chemistry with each other. Mitchell has attended several camps over the years, but not in the last year.
Something else came first.
Kelsey Mitchell was going back to school. She’s getting a doctorate – yes, the Fever’s leader in PPG is getting her Ph.D – in Educational Leadership through Liberty University.
“I was given an opportunity, and I’m always grateful for the opportunity for USA Camp, but I had some of my own things – trying to get back in school, and trying to get ready for the season – so I think they chose the people that were a lot more committed,” she says. “I think it’s about respecting who they chose, and I think there are a lot of great players in this league, and I just wish them the best.”
But now we’re getting closer to the topic I’ve come to ask Kelsey Mitchell, the story I was there write on the night of Aug. 11 … until Stephanie White walked into the interview room down the hall and blasted “the fearmongering, the divisiveness, the stuff that’s trying to hijack our league.”
How, I’m asking Kelsey Mitchell moments after White entered the nearby news conference room, have you played at this level with all the hysteria around you? And while the hysteria clearly hasn’t distracted you, I’m telling her, do you sense it has distracted others from the season you’re having?
“Honestly,” she says, “and this is out of respect – I don’t care. I don’t care what people have to say. I’ve already chalked it up that I’m never going to be seen like that in some people’s eyes.
“Everything I’ve done up to the point has been work. The Fever wasn’t always what it is (now), and a lot of people know that but don’t really respect my nine years and how it came about. A lot of what I do and what I bring to the table is just me and what I went through to get to this point.”
And how about the noise around this league, and this team? It’s always something, I’m telling Mitchell, but clearly you’ve blocked it out. She offers a small nod, a tired smile.
“I think God is full-on real,” she says, “and I think there’s truth in how to pray for being able to control certain things that I know I can control. I think the reality of our league, and some of the stuff that comes with it, is that it’s the people, it’s some of the fans that watch, and I can’t control them, man. I can’t control who people are and I can’t control how they think and what they believe.
“All I can do is control my narrative. You don’t want to lose sight of that.”
The interview is over. The game’s about to start. Mitchell’s about to score 28 points on 11-for-16 shooting (4 of 4 on 3-pointers) against the New York Liberty, leading the Fever to the second win of their current four-game winning streak, and afterward teammates will talk her up.
“She’s the best scorer in the league, hands down – it’s not even close,” Caitlin Clark says in the postgame news conference.
“She’s the MVP,” Boston says of Mitchell.
Maybe so. This has been her season, whether anyone’s noticed or not.
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