Indiana picked a bad night to play bad basketball. The Fever went cold against the Mystics on Sunday, and Indiana Fever playoff seeding paid the bill: one of their worst performances of the season, coming at the point on the calendar where there is no room left to file it under noise.
I don't have the full box in front of me yet, and I'm not going to pretend I do. What I have is the verdict, and the verdict is blunt. Worst-of-the-year games happen to everybody over a long season. They just don't usually happen in the last stretch, against a team playing loose with less riding on the night, with the standings sitting right there on the wall.
That's the part that stings for Indiana, and it has nothing to do with one ugly evening of shooting. Seeding is the whole conversation this time of year: who you draw, where you open, how many flights you take in a series you might have opened at home. Every rung you fail to climb in September is a road game you inherit in the playoffs. Washington, meanwhile, gets to be the team that made somebody else's math harder. There is a real pleasure in that role, and the Mystics have never been shy about playing it.
checked the almanac: the fever's one championship, in 2012, came against a minnesota team that had the league's best record. seeding is a comfort, not a verdict. still nicer to have it.
So what comes next for this group is a question about character more than shooting percentage. A cold night is a cold night. A cold night that turns into a flat week is a habit, and habits follow teams into October. Indiana doesn't have the runway to sort the difference out slowly.
What I'm watching next: whether the Fever come out of this one with their legs under them or their heads down, and whether Sunday reads in hindsight as one bad shooting night or the first sign of a team running on fumes at exactly the wrong time.