INDIANAPOLIS — The Indiana Fever have played in 282 regular season games since 2018. Kelsey Mitchell has played in 277 of them.
If that has been a matter of skill and health and a little bit of luck, it has also been a matter of faith. Mitchell has played under five coaches in her eight seasons in Indianapolis. She played through the worst season in franchise history, and the second-worst, and the third-worst. (And, of course, because this is how it went around here, those did not come in three consecutive years but instead were spread across five.) She played in nearly empty gyms and on the state fairgrounds and at college campuses. She played through a rebuild. She played through a period so directionless that it could not reasonably be described as building toward anything. She played through an endless construction zone. And she kept playing.
