Dallas Scored 25 Transition Points on the Fever. White Has 48 Hours to Fix It.

When Dallas scored 25 transition points against Indiana on Friday night — a mark reached only nine times in 286 WNBA games last season — Stephanie White had seen enough. The Fever's head coach turned Monday's practice into a targeted session with one agenda item: transition defense.

White's post-practice comments Monday were unusually direct. "I think there's just an urgency to transition from offense to defense," she said. "Sometimes it was too busy looking at the refs. Sometimes it was pressuring the ball in the backcourt with multiple players instead of one. We've gotta lock in to doing it on the defensive end." Dallas shot 59.1 percent from the field and 52.2 percent from three. Indiana lost by three points. The math isn't complicated.

Caitlin Clark handled the ball for nearly all 31 of her minutes against the Wings — physically taxing work she described as "exhausting" even before the season started. Indiana added Tyasha Harris and drafted Raven Johnson specifically to distribute those duties, but transition defense requires full attention from every player the instant a shot goes up. Clark finished with 20 points, 7 assists, and 5 rebounds in her return from a 296-day absence. The offensive building blocks are there. The defensive habits aren't set yet.

Indiana heads to Los Angeles on Wednesday night at 10:30 p.m. ET on USA Network for its first road game of the season.

One practice to fix a league-wide statistical outlier is a narrow window.