INDIANAPOLIS — Kelsey Mitchell looked over to Indiana Fever PR staffers with a quick question before talking about how her season ended in Game 5 of the WNBA semifinals last year.
The three-time All-Star guard was taken off the court, declining a stretcher, midway through the third quarter against Las Vegas with “numbness/paralyzing feeling” in her legs.
At Monday’s training camp session, Mitchell asked if she could curse before explaining the scenario. Would she want to change anything that led to her legs giving out?
“Hell naw,” Mitchell said emphatically. “If I’ve got to do it all over again and let my body fall out the way it did, I’m going to do it. I love the game that much. I love competing that much. Lord willing, it doesn’t happen again like that.
“Hopefully it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. But I’m going to die on my sword every game, every time.”
Mitchell was diagnosed with rhabdomyolysis, a condition when muscle cells break down and release a protein into the bloodstream. The league’s No. 2 scorer last season was logging major minutes down the stretch as the Fever roster was decimated by injuries. Mitchell played 33-plus minutes in five of the team’s seven playoff games before the semifinal showdown against the Aces, including 37 and 39 minutes in Games 3 and 4.
Mitchell said she was cleared in two weeks after getting IVs and CT scans. The moment was a scary one in Las Vegas as what initially looked like severe cramping sent Mitchell to the hospital. For approximately five minutes, she was down being attended to by medical staff. Mitchell later posted on social media that her body “locked up from a physical standpoint” and that she had “no movement from my lower extremities for up to 5 to 7 seconds.”
Mitchell was named first-team All-WNBA for the first time in 2025, ranking No. 3 in points per game (20.2) and leading a remodeled lineup that lost Caitlin Clark, Sophie Cunningham, Aari McDonald, Sydney Colson and Chloe Bibby to season-ending injuries. She also finished fifth in MVP voting.
“It was definitely what I needed, though, because we had played so much basketball,” Mitchell said of the time off. “I’m sure people took a longer time off, for real, for real. But I was cleared in, like, two weeks.”
Mitchell was rewarded with a one-year, $1.4 million supermax deal to return to the team that drafted her No. 2 overall in 2018. She explained that there were multiple conversations with Clark, Lexie Hull and Aliyah Boston, who signed a four-year $6.3 million extension to remain in Indianapolis.
“We knew that we wanted to be together,” Mitchell said. “So that was the easy part, being able to sit down and break bread with the people that you enjoy playing the game with. That was the easiest part of it.”
