Indiana, which hasn’t made the playoffs since 2016, had a 44% chance of getting the No. 1 pick, but became only the third franchise to win the draft lottery in consecutive seasons.
Coming off a heralded career where she was one of the faces of college basketball, the 2022 Wooden Award winner has been tabbed as the missing centerpiece to resuscitate the moribund Fever.
The Indiana Fever also used the seventh pick in the first round on Indiana University’s Grace Berger, who helped the Hoosiers win 118 games during her college career.
Dunn, 75, who coached the Fever to the 2012 WNBA title, took over as interim general manager and senior adviser for the team’s basketball operations in February after the resignation of Tamika Catchings.
White, who led Purdue University to a national championship, has a combined 15 seasons of experience as a player and coach in the WNBA, most recently as the head of the Indiana Fever in 2015-2016.
The former Fever assistant returns to Indiana after a one-year stint as an assistant with the Atlanta Dream.
Allison Barber shares her take on the 18-game losing streak, the franchise’s new rebuild strategy, her top priorities in the off-season and the challenges of leading an organization mired in a rough transition.
The Fever finished the season with a 5-31 record, tying the WNBA mark for most regular-season losses.
Marianne Stanley brought a Hall of Fame resume to the Fever bench, but her teams won just 14 games in a little more than two seasons.
The Fever went into Monday night’s three-round draft with seven picks overall and ended up with two players from Baylor and one each from Louisville, Stanford, Jackson State, South Carolina and Indiana University.
The Fever got the fourth and sixth overall picks from the Wings in the deal announced Tuesday. Indiana already had the Nos. 2 and 10 picks, and would be the first WNBA team to make four first-round picks in the same draft if it keeps and uses all of them.
Catchings has not been able to duplicate the success she had as a player in her role as an executive with the Indiana Fever. The team has named former coach Lin Dunn to replace Catchings on an interim basis.
The 18,000-seat venue downtown is now called Gainbridge Fieldhouse, thanks to a multiyear sponsorship deal between Pacers Sports & Entertainment and Indianapolis-based insurance holding firm Group One Thousand One LLC, the parent of Gainbridge Insurance Agency LLC.
Twenty-five WNBA games will be televised on ABC and ESPN in celebration of the league’s 25th season, with Google as the presenting sponsor.
The women’s pro basketball league announced on Monday that seven of its 137 players have tested positive. Fever officials confirmed two of them played for Indiana.
Players would receive their entire salaries for the year despite playing a schedule that’s only about two-thirds the length of the 36-game one that was supposed to start May 15.
The regular season isn’t set to begin until May 15, so the pandemic has not affected daily operations as much as other professional leagues. The WNBA, however, has been evaluating its schedule, with training camps slated to begin April 26.
Tamika Catchings won collegiate and Olympic titles before spending her entire 15-year professional career with the Indiana Fever and leading the team to its lone WNBA title in 2012.
The WNBA and its union announced a tentative eight-year labor deal Tuesday that will allow top players to earn more than $500,000 while the average annual compensation will surpass six figures for the first time.
Marianne Stanley, 65, is a member of the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame who won an NCAA title in 1985 and was WNBA coach of the year in 2002.
