Fever at Risk of Missing WNBA Playoffs Ahead of Wild Final Week

The WNBA regular season often comes down to its final day, and the 2025 season looks no different. The top eight teams qualify for the playoffs, with five already in.

The Minnesota Lynx, Las Vegas Aces, Atlanta Dream, and Phoenix Mercury were the first four teams to clinch spots, with the Lynx six games clear of the top spot as of Wednesday morning. The Aces, Dream, and Mercury are in a standoff for the second, third, and fourth seeds each with a record of 26–14. The Lynx not only clinched a spot in the playoffs, they’ve locked up the No. 1 overall seed with their 31st win of the season last week.

Notably absent from the top four are the defending champion New York Liberty. Their playoff spot was clinched Tuesday night despite their 66–58 loss to the Golden State Valkyries thanks to the Mercury’s win over the Indiana Fever. 

Just behind the Libs, four teams are fighting for three spots. The ninth-place Sparks trail the sixth-place Valkyries by just two and a half games, with the Storm and Fever currently occupying the final two playoff spots.

The playoffs begin September 14, with the Finals going as late as October 17.

Format change

The WNBA announced a major change to the format last year, with the Board of Governors approving the expansion of the Finals from best-of-five to best-of-seven series. The Finals will be played with a 2-2-1-1-1 structure with the higher seed hosting games One, Two, Five, and Seven.

The first round will continue to be best of three, but in a change from past years, the higher seed will host the first and last games instead of the first two. 

The first round from 2022 to 2024 featured a best of three series, but the higher seed hosted the first two games. 

The semifinals will continue to be a best-of-five series. 

Fever faltering 

Coming into the season the Fever were pegged as a title contender following a blockbuster free agency that included signing veterans DeWanna Bonner and Natasha Howard. Bonner played just nine games for the Fever before requesting a trade and forcing her way out of Indiana. After the Fever failed to find a suitable trade option, they cut her. Even worse for the Fever are the injuries. Caitlin Clark has missed a majority of the season, playing just 13 games during her highly anticipated sophomore season. 

Clark hasn’t played since July 13, and the Fever are 13–15 when she sits. The team continues to list her as out with a right groin injury.

Additionally, the Fever lost guards Sydney Colson, Sophie Cunningham, and Aari McDonald—whom they signed to aid in Clark’s absence—to season-ending injuries. The Fever’s final three games of the regular season pit them against the Chicago Sky, Washington Mystics, and Lynx as they cling to a playoff spot. 

Tuesday’s 85–79 loss to the Mercury dropped them to eighth in the league standings with a one game advantage on the ninth-place Sparks. 

“We still control our destiny,” Fever coach Stephanie White said after the loss. “We have to make sure we are playing the game that’s in front of us. Oftentimes when you start to look too far ahead you miss opportunities that are right in front of you.” 

Clark’s absence from the playoffs would be painful for the league, though ratings and attendance have still been strong despite her missing much of the season.

Last year the Fever’s two playoff games against the Sun reached 1.8 million viewers and 2.5 million viewers. The WNBA Finals averaged 1.57 million viewers, with Game 5 hitting a record 2.4 million. 

This season, the WNBA set an all-time attendance record of over 2.5 million fans as of August 20 despite Clark being sidelined. WNBA viewership was also up 21% through 56 games this season compared to the entire 2024 season, with ratings for the non-Fever games up 37% from last year as of the end of last month. 

Sliding Liberty

All season the Liberty have emphasized that once they were healthy, they’d play like a championship-caliber team. So far, that team has yet to materialize. The team hasn’t played at full strength since May, as Sabrina Ionescu, Jonquel Jones, and Breanna Stewart have played just 12 games together. 

General manager Jonathan Kolb added depth, including one of the most significant midseason signings in league history in Emma Meesseman, but the team has still struggled. After a 10–1 start, the Liberty have gone just 14–16, sliding all the way to fifth.

At 24–17, they have an outside chance to jump to a top-three seed (and avoid a second-round matchup with the Lynx) if they win at least two of their three remaining games against the Storm, Mystics, and Sky. However, they would also need the three teams they’re competing with for seeding—Aces, Dream, and Mercury—to lose to varying degrees. They have the tiebreaker advantage over the Aces, but would rely on the second tiebreaker—the team with the better record against teams with a .500 record or better—against the Dream. The Mercury have the edge over the Liberty if a tiebreaker was the deciding factor in their seeding. If the Mercury were to lose their remaining four games and the Liberty were to win out, New York would still fall to the third seed because of that tiebreaker.  

“It’s got nothing to do with other teams,” Liberty coach Sandy Brondello said before Tuesday’s loss. “They’re great teams. We’ve just got to be better. This is all about us finding our best, finding our potential. We haven’t lived up to it yet, but we will in these next few games.”

The Aces, riding a 12-game win streak, have the toughest strength of schedule to close out the season of these teams with a game against the Lynx—who blew them out by 53 points after the All-Star break—and the surging Sparks and the Sky. 

The Mercury and Dream each have four games remaining, all of them against teams in the bottom five of the WNBA standings. 

Biggest surprises

Valkyries head coach Natalie Nakase, who is in the running for Coach of the Year, has taken a team of players that went unprotected by the 12 other franchises and turned them into a playoff contender with strong potential to make it out of the first round. They became the first expansion franchise in WNBA history to record 18 wins in its inaugural season. If they lock up one of the three remaining playoff spots they will make more history, becoming the first expansion franchise to compete in the postseason in year one.

If the season ended today, they’d meet the league’s second-biggest surprise in the first round: the Atlanta Dream, led by another Coach of the Year candidate in Karl Smesko. There were questions about how Smesko’s system would translate to the WNBA. Instead, Smesko flipped the team from last in the league in offensive rating in 2024 to second this season behind the Lynx. 

Steady Lynx 

The Lynx revenge tour after last year’s Finals loss has gone according to plan. They have maintained control of the top spot in the standings for most of the season with the league’s top rated offense and defense. They are two games away from tying the WNBA record for most regular season wins—held by the Aces at 34—with four games remaining, including one against Las Vegas. The defunct Houston Comets hold the WNBA record for highest win percentage (.900)  in league history having lost just three games in their 30-game season in 1999.