INDIANAPOLIS — The Indiana Fever began their preseason home opener out of sorts. Missed shots, defensive miscues and careless turnovers defined the first quarter and change of Thursday’s game vs. Atlanta.

Then came Grace Berger.

Despite veteran guards Kelsey Mitchell (left ankle) and Erica Wheeler (illness) being out on Thursday, Berger didn’t play in the first quarter against the Dream. When the second-year guard subbed in with 7:39 left in the second quarter, the Fever trailed by 15.

Benbow: You had to see it to believe it. The Caitlin Clark effect is real and it’s potent.

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Berger assisted on Fever baskets in her first three possessions on the floor to catalyze a quick 7-0 run. By the time the quarter ended, Berger had two more assists and Indiana was down just a point.

Berger finished with six points, five rebounds and seven assists. Her presence brought the Fever back into the game they eventually won 83-80.

“She came out there and she stabilized us,” Fever coach Christie Sides said. “She got us into some offense and we got good looks off it.”

Berger knows her playing time will fluctuate. With a guard rotation headlined by No. 1 overall pick Caitlin Clark and the two highest-paid players on the team — Mitchell and Wheeler — getting Berger involved isn’t a priority. But the IU grad feels she can bring a necessary punch off the bench.

“As someone coming off the bench, it’s good that I get to kind of analyze the start of the game and can see what my team needs,” Berger said. “And then hopefully, I can come in and meet that need in any way I can. Whether that’s rebounding, defense, running the team — really anything that I can do to provide that spark off the bench.” 

After a few minutes of Berger running point guard, Clark subbed back in to play alongside Berger. The Fever ran a three-guard lineup of Clark, Berger and second-round rookie Celeste Taylor. With starting post players NaLyssa Smith and Aliyah Boston down low, the Fever’s momentum continued.

When Berger first entered the game, she was the team’s point guard. When she played with Clark and Taylor, Berger essentially became the small forward in that lineup. Berger played well enough to be in Indiana’s closing lineup, where she played shooting guard with Clark at point guard and free agent addition Katie Lou Samuelson at small forward. 

The Fever have an abundance of lineup combinations to try throughout the year. If Berger can effectively alternate between playing three different positions on the floor, she’ll bring substantial value to what Sides and her staff do in 2024.

Berger was tasked with multiple roles in her 19 minutes of action, and she answered the challenge, finishing with a game-high +16 +/-.

“Once I got out there, it didn’t matter who else was out there,” Berger said. “I felt comfortable running in the system.”

In a league as exclusive as the WNBA, players must do what it takes to stick around. Many players have to identify one niche skill and aim to perfect it. But Berger’s value comes from being able to do a little bit of everything. 

At 6-0, Berger is tall enough and strong enough to go against small forwards. But her ball-handling and vision are sharp enough to play point guard in stretches. 

There are only 144 guaranteed spots in this league, and Berger is a member of a competitive guard room this season. If she continues to show extreme versatility, Berger won’t just stick on the final roster — she’ll solidify a spot in the rotation.

Follow IndyStar sports reporter Zion Brown on X at @z10nbr0wn.

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to This Post)

Presenting our semi-regular weekly survey of what’s goin’ down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin’ gets done, and where the post office has been stolen and the mailbox is locked.

We begin in Indiana, where a woman named Jennifer Pace won a Republican primary election to run against incumbent Rep. Andre Carson in the state’s Seventh Congressional District. And this was a remarkable victory because Ms. Pace had become not merely dead, but really most sincerely dead, two months before she won the primary. From Fox59 in Indianapolis:

The leader in the Republican race for Indiana’s seventh district seat in the U.S. House of Representatives has been dead since March. According to results from Tuesday’s primary election, Jennifer Pace is leading the race with 31.2% of the vote, or 7,704 votes, as of Wednesday morning. Pace reportedly died of a heart attack in March after she qualified to be on the ballot.

Naturally, Ms. Pace’s victory raises a number of questions, the biggest one of which is how the hell this happened two freaking months after her death. Was every GOP voter in the district simply not paying attention? Did nobody notice that the leading Republican candidate mysteriously stopped campaigning in March, or did we have a Weekend at Bernie’s thing going on here? Not that any of this matters; Carson’s going to win re-election from here to there, but it does seem to indicate that somebody in the Indiana GOP has to start noticing whether their candidates have joined the choir invisible.

We move north to Wisconsin, where the president made a very shrewd move on Wednesday. He showed up in Racine to announce that Microsoft was going to invest $3.3 billion in developing an AI data center there. The really nifty political move was to announce that the new plant was going to be built on the proposed site of the Foxconn debacle, the site of the monumental bait-and-switch pulled on saps like the former president* and the former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage its midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin. From The New York Times:

The Microsoft data center will be built on grounds where Mr. Trump, as president, announced in 2017 that Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer, would build a $10 billion factory for making LCD panels. Mr. Trump promised that it would be the “eighth wonder of the world,” and visited the site with elected officials and golden shovels. But the project never materialized as expected. On Wednesday, Mr. Biden took direct aim at the failed promise. “Look what happened—they dug a hole with those golden shovels, and then they fell into it,” Mr. Biden told the crowd. “During the previous administration, my predecessor made promises, which he broke more than kept, left a lot of people behind in communities like Racine,” Mr. Biden said. “On my watch, we make promises and we keep promises.”

It’s always nice when you can feed yourself a layup.

We move along to West Virginia, where there are massive costs looming regarding the cleanup of abandoned coal mines. The state has a fund to finance this monumental job, but as Ken Ward Jr. of the Mountain State Spotlight reports, that fund is one corporate bankruptcy away from being tapped out—and the people of West Virginia are one corporate bankruptcy away from holding the bag.

The bankruptcy of just one significant mining company could wipe out the fund, according to the state’s top regulatory official. And auditors for the Republican-controlled Legislature said at least five major companies were “at risk” of dumping cleanup costs on the state. At $15 million, the state’s fund for restoring land is at its lowest level in more than 20 years. The program’s latest published actuarial report in 2022 warned that a related water cleanup trust fund will lose half its balance over the next 10 years. These are costs the coal industry was supposed to cover. Unreclaimed mine sites can not only damage the environment but also endanger coalfield residents who live nearby. Coal waste dams sometimes leak or break, flooding downstream communities. Cliffs of rock and debris left behind after mining can collapse. Runoff that isn’t contained or treated often poisons fish or water supplies.

Working with the good people at ProPublica—and nice job, Pulitzer Committee—Ward points out that this is not a problem that suddenly cropped up.

State and federal officials have been warned repeatedly over the past 40 years that this reckoning was coming but have failed to prepare for it. Again and again, the review found, auditors questioned whether West Virginia’s reclamation program would have adequate funding. But neither state lawmakers nor regulators required coal companies to have enough reclamation bonds as insurance should they go belly up. Nor did legislators raise the tax on coal production enough to make up the difference. Federal officials in both Republican and Democratic administrations who were supposed to oversee the state program cautioned there were problems but didn’t step in.

Just two years ago, West Virginia’s legislative leaders ignored recommendations from their own auditors to bolster the fund. Instead, they called for an $8 billion bailout from the federal government. And last month, Gov. Jim Justice’s administration removed a key critic from an advisory panel that monitors the fund, just as the group was about to review a new study on the fund’s future health. The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Taking care of the public’s money is undeniably part of the government’s job. But decades of anti-tax nihilism have resulted in governments that act out of reflexive fear and not out of reasoned caution. Problems go unresolved until they evolve into crises. Then the public gets angry at the emergency remedial costs anyway.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Gully Spelunker Friedman of the Plains brings us a tale of local dogs hungry for homework. From KFOR-TV in Oklahoma City:

U.S. News and World Report says the Oklahoma State Department of Education (OSDE) did not grant them access to schools’ AP testing data, causing numerous Oklahoma schools to plummet in U.S. News’ rankings the past two years. OSDE claims they sent the data, but it must’ve been lost in the mail.

There is nothing worse than imaginative bureaucrats, and Oklahoma seems to be plagued by a number of them. I mean, seriously—lost in the mail??? This kind of obvious f*ck-up calls for multisyllabic words in dependent clauses in insanely complicated sentences, a kind of government-speak that’s halfway between Harvard Business School and Finnegans Wake. Of course, you can still say it got lost in the mail, but the point is to say it in such a way as to wear out your superiors so that they’re too exhausted to notice that your uncle, the county commissioner, put you into a job you’re too dumb or lazy to handle. That’s the American way.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.

Before she makes her official WNBA regular-season debut, Caitlin Clark will have one more chance to get acclimated.

Clark and the Indiana Fever will be playing their second and final preseason game Thursday against the Atlanta Dream at the Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, marking the first time Clark will play in front of her home fans.

Clark was the No. 1 overall selection in the 2024 WNBA draft in mid-April after a wildly productive college career with the Iowa Hawkeyes, in which she broke the all-time scoring record for men’s and women’s basketball.

Here’s everything you need to know about Thursday’s preseason game between the Indiana Fever and the Atlanta Dream.

What time is Indiana Fever vs. Atlanta Dream?

Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever will host the Atlanta Dream Thursday at 7 p.m. ET. The game will take place at the Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis.

How to watch Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever play the Atlanta Dream tonight

The Indiana Fever game against the Atlanta Dream is available on the WNBA’s League Pass. Fans can get League Pass by downloading the WNBA app. Preseason games are free. The game also is available for streaming on Fubo here (regional restrictions apply).

The game is otherwise not televised.

How did Caitlin Clark do in her first preseason game?

In what was maybe the most anticipated preseason game in the 28-year history of the WNBA, Clark and the Fever played in Dallas against the Wings last Friday. Indiana dropped the game, 79-76, but Clark played well in her first-ever WNBA action.

She started the game and played 28 minutes, and finished 6-of-15 from the floor — including 5-of-13 from 3-point range — to score 21 points. She also added three rebounds, two assists and two steals, but committed five turnovers. She made all but one of her five free throw attempts.

As she did throughout her college career at Iowa, Clark flashed her ability to elude defenders in the perimeter with her dribbling and showed off her deep range.

When do Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever open the regular season?

Caitlin Clark and the Fever will open the regular season on the road against the Connecticut Sun on May 14. Their home opener is May 16 against the New York Liberty.