How the Sparks are learning from the Fever amidst their own rebuild

The Sparks are in the middle of a rebuild, but the Fever offer an example of how quickly things can turn around.

INDIANAPOLIS — Heading into Wednesday’s meeting, the Sparks and Fever could hardly have been on more different trajectories.

The Fever were riding in on a high after clinching the franchise’s first playoff berth since 2016 less than 24 hours earlier. Winners of four in a row and eight of their last 10 games, few teams in the league are playing better than Indiana.

Los Angeles, meanwhile, is almost assuredly going to secure the No. 1 spot in the 2025 WNBA Draft lottery. With separate losing streaks of eight and seven games this season, the Sparks have a good claim for the worst team in the league.

That wasn’t the case when the two teams met barely 13 months ago. Last July, the Sparks earned a pair of wins over a Fever team that was bottoming out as the league’s worst. LA, meanwhile, was the team focused on the playoffs.

With the Sparks now the ones rebuilding, Indiana, in many ways, offers a blueprint of how to turn things around in the snap of a finger. Obviously, Caitlin Clark has a lot to do with that turnaround, but the roster around her was years in the making.

Specifically, all five of Indiana’s starters in Wednesday’s eventual win over the Sparks were Fever draftees. For Sparks head coach Curt Miller, the draft is where any rebuild starts.

“I’ve watched teams that have built through the draft,” Miller said. “You watch the Aces and what they were like in San Antonio, they move to Vegas and continue to have draft picks, continue to add pieces around those draft picks. Now you see it [in Indiana] with multiple draft picks in a row and you still have Kelsey Mitchell when that all started and now where the Fever are. They were a team that was built through the draft.”

There are more similarities between the two teams than an initial glance at records might suggest. Both teams have promising young bigs in Aliyah Boston and Cameron Brink. They both have standout veterans in Kelsey Mitchell and Dearica Hamby.

While the Fever don’t have a direct comparison to Rickea Jackson, who is on her way to a First Team All-Rookie season, they did draft both Lexie Hull and Nalyssa Smith, who have rounded out the starting lineup for Indiana.

The Fever mixed in the likes of veterans like Katie Lou Samuelson, Erica Wheeler and Damiris Dantas across many seasons to round out the roster with veterans. The Sparks have signed Stephanie Talbot and Azurà Stevens to extensions in recent weeks.

All of this has been by design for the Sparks. After years of competing for the playoffs with a team built around Nneka Ogwumike, LA was forced into a rebuild when she departed in free agency.

Now, the team is focused on laying the groundwork for a successful future.

“When I went to LA two years ago, the focus was kind of putting pieces around Nneka (Ogwumike), one of the true superstars of the league and long-time Spark,” Miller said. “When Nneka was leaving in free agency, there was a clear direction to build with youth. Unfortunately, Cameron Brink’s been hurt, we’ve had a lot of people in and out of our lineup but Rickea Jackson is our rising star in this league. We still have a lot of players in the prime of their career and taking on larger roles than they ever have.

“We understand the process and the build. It’s almost like our second “first year” because of the direction change and now the youth movement.”

The elephant in the room in this conversation is Clark, who is a unicorn when it comes to WNBA prospects. Whatever team she landed on would have been an immediate contender this season. But the Fever had the pieces in place to make the transition much more seamless.

Clark is a one-of-one and while there isn’t another like her in women’s basketball, there’s a really damn good prospect in Paige Bueckers that’ll likely enter the draft next spring. She may not be Clark, but there’s a good chance she’s a generational prospect in her own right.

The Sparks have positioned themselves to both be in a prime spot to land Bueckers — Wednesday’s loss inches them to within reaching distance of the No. 1 spot in the lottery — should she declare and help her immediately flourish if she lands on the roster.

If a few ping pong balls bounce their way and Bueckers dons a purple and gold jersey next season, the next meeting between the Sparks and Fever could be drastically different yet again and with entirely new stakes on the line.

You can follow Jacob on Twitter at @JacobRude.