Reality is coming for Diana Taurasi — she said it herself.
Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark joined Taurasi, the former Phoenix Mercury star, and newly minted Hall of Famer Sue Bird on the Bird and Taurasi show on Sunday afternoon during the women’s national championship game between UConn and South Carolina. When Clark popped up on Zoom, she first congratulated Taurasi on her recent retirement from the Mercury.
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“Unfortunately, reality is coming for me now,” Taurasi joked, eliciting Clark to throw her head back with a laugh.
That quip from Taurasi called back to something she said last year about Clark and the other 2024 rookies ahead of their transition to the WNBA, when she told SportsCenter’s Scott Van Pelt that “reality is coming. There’s levels to this thing. And that’s just life, we all went through it.”
While Clark did have a bit of a slow start to her rookie season, she finished fourth in MVP voting as the near-unanimous Rookie of the Year. She broke the WNBA single-season assists record with 336 and set the rookie single-season scoring record, breaking nearly every Fever rookie record. She averaged a team-high 19.2 points per game, along with 8.4 assists and 5.7 rebounds.
“You had an amazing rookie season,” Taurasi told Clark during the broadcast. “You blew everyone out of the water.”
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The Fever finished 20-20 and made the playoffs for the first time since 2016, getting bounced out of the first round by the Connecticut Sun.
Indiana went through a near-complete rebuild in the offseason, too, with a new front office, coaching staff headed by Stephanie White, and seven new players. Taurasi asked Clark about the upcoming WNBA season, commenting that new additions like Natasha Howard, DeWanna Bonner and Sophie Cunningham make it a team that could compete immediately.
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“Obviously, on paper, we have a really good team,” Clark said. “But we only have — we start training camp on the 27th, then we have a back-to-back of preseason games on May 3 and May 4, so you have a very short amount of time to put that together. Seven new pieces, whether we carry 11 or 12, that’s more than half of our roster, and that’s a hard thing within itself, but I think we should be pretty good, and I’m excited about it.”
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Caitlin Clark on new additions to Indiana Fever
