By Madie Chandler | FeverBasketball.com
In 2023, the WNBA All-Star voting returns revealed Las Vegas’ A’ja Wilson at the no. 1 spot, totaling 95,860 votes. On Tuesday, Indiana’s Caitlin Clark held that top overall spot, and received a total of 700,735 votes – a difference of over 600,000 votes.
For reference, the top-five vote getters just one season ago received 391,639 votes combined. This season, Clark and Aliyah Boston finished top-two in fan voting, gathering 1.3 million votes together.
It’s Boston’s second consecutive year finishing top-five in fan voting after finishing fourth in 2023. In addition to Clark and Boston, Kelsey Mitchell earned her spot on Team WNBA as a selection by the league’s head coaches, marking her second appearance on an All-Star team. The Fever’s trio of All-Stars will line up against Team USA’s Paris Olympics roster in Phoenix later this month.
“It’s awesome,” coach Christie Sides said. “I mean, to have three All-Stars for the Indiana Fever this year, I’m so proud for them, so proud for our organization. These guys deserve it. They’ve been working hard, keep getting better – it just shows the future and what that looks like for the Indiana Fever.”
A roller-coaster season for Indiana leaves them with an 8-13 record after a loss to Las Vegas on Tuesday, but the young Fever aren’t letting the unprecedented attention of a historic season escape them.
They’ve performed in front of crowds of greater than 20,000 twice, once in Washington and again on Tuesday in Las Vegas. Indiana holds the league’s best attendance in home and away contests, pulling in an average north of 16,000 fans per contest. That number is nearly 6,000 more fans than the second-place Liberty, who see an average of 10,340 faces at their games.
The influx in viewership and fan interest sent WNBA All-Star voting skyward, and Clark, Boston, and Mitchell reaped the benefits of the increased attention.
“I think it’s special,” Boston said of Indiana’s All-Star selections. “I think it just goes to show the talent that we have on this team. It’s really amazing to be able to play together as an All-Star, but also I think this is really exciting for Caitlin. Being a rookie, coming in, and just having an impact the way that she does.”
The 20,366 fans in attendance for the Fever’s matchup with the reigning champion Aces marks the league’s highest attendance for a regular season game since 1999. It also measured up to be the fifth most-attended regular season game in WNBA history.
“The more fans the merrier, whoever you’re coming to watch,” Aces coach Becky Hammon said.
The game is growing, thanks in large part to Clark. Clark’s senior season at Iowa saw the Hawkeyes set or break attendance records in all but two of their games, including her famous matchups with Angel Reese and her LSU team. Now the two will compete on the same side for the first time, as Reese also earned her first All-Star selection as a rookie.
“I know people are going to be really excited about it, but I hope it doesn’t take away from everybody else,” Clark said of playing with Reese. “This is a huge accomplishment for everybody on Team USA and everybody on Team WNBA. They all deserve the same praise…Obviously this is something that’s really hard to accomplish, so the best we can celebrate all of them will be great. I’m just going to obviously soak in the experience because you never know if you’re ever going to be able to get back there and it’ll be fun for all of us, for sure.”
Boston, Clark, and Mitchell’s All-Star selections mark just the second time in franchise history that Indiana will send three players to an All-Star game. The first was in 2007 when Tamika Catchings, Anna DeForge, and Tammy Sutton-Brown earned All-Star honors.
“It’s a really, really big thing for our franchise but I think more importantly it kind of just shows where we are as players and where we aspire to be individually,” Mitchell said “And I think any great player, great competitor, has an All-Star somewhere down on their list. We put in a lot of hard work.”
That work has paid off for Boston, Clark, and Mitchell as they head into the last stretch of games before the Olympic break as newly-minted All-Stars.