Twitter Gold: Beautiful Ball Movement By The Indiana Fever

Brilliant basketball from the WNBA’s Fever

As a basketball fan, if you’re lucky, you’ll see a great passer or two during your lifetime. They don’t really come along that often.

If you look up old clips of Bob Cousy, you’ll see that he had it. He could make passes that Larry Bird would admire. Bird and his great rival Magic Johnson had it. Pistol Pete Maravich had it too - he could make unbelievable passes. Jason Williams - the other one, not the one who went to Duke - could do it. Going back a bit, so could Ernie DiGregorio.

It’s a rare gift to be able to make passes that no one sees coming or to make passes that move the ball on the right path to an open shooter. And great passers have the capacity to make other players become better passers because once someone starts doing it, you want to do it too.

Take this beautiful sequence from the Indiana Fever.

Caitlin Clark starts the play by hitting an open teammate in a deep corner. She immediately moves the ball to her left. That players also moves it to her left and that teammate gets an easy open three. Notice that after the first pass by Clark, the ball does not touch the floor.

If you think Indiana was playing like this before Clark joined the team, think again. Even last season, it took awhile for her teammates to accept her. Pretty clearly, they now have, and the rest of us will get to see basketball like this. It really is the purest form of the game.