Injuries are starting to pile up for the Indiana Fever, including a quad strain for star guard Caitlin Clark. Luckily for the team, the WNBA allows teams to sign players to temporary hardship deals when they're dealing with multiple injuries, so the team signed Aari McDonald on Monday to an emergency hardship deal.
McDonald, who was surprisingly waived by the Los Angeles Sparks just before the season began, brings with her key WNBA experience, though there are also reasons why McDonald was available at this point. We'll get into those later.
First, though, let's just talk about who Aari McDonald is.
Who is Aari McDonald?
Aari McDonald originally rose to prominence at Arizona in college, where she led the Wildcats on a deep tournament run, upsetting UConn in the Final Four but losing to Stanford in the national title game.
McDonald parlayed that strong season into becoming the No. 3 overall pick in the 2021 WNBA Draft despite some concerns about her scoring efficiency. She spent three seasons with the Dream, mostly coming off the bench.
While she showed some improvement over her time in Atlanta, her shooting issues plagued her, and last offseason, she was traded to the Sparks.
McDonald played 26 games for Los Angeles with 10 starts. She averaged 8.7 points, 2.0 rebounds, 3.7 assists and 0.9 steals last season for the Sparks.
What does McDonald bring to the Fever?
With Clark out, the Fever need two things: a secondary ball-handler beside Kelsey Mitchell and additional shooting.
McDonald doesn't help much with the latter. She's a career 32.3 percent shooter from deep, which isn't terrible but also isn't great. She's like ... the low-end of the middle of the road as a shooter, which at this point, the Fever are probably okay with, considering the team is shooting just 33.6 percent from 3-point range as a team. McDonald won't make that worse, though she won't really improve it.
As far as ball-handling goes, McDonald has shown across her four WNBA seasons that she's slightly too turnover-prone to be a team's primary initiator, but she can work as a secondary ball-handler, at least in the short term.
Early in her career, McDonald showed some defensive aptitude, including finishing fifth in the league in 2022 in steal rate. Her steal numbers dried up majorly over the past two seasons, but with McDonald not needing to focus too much attention on scoring in Indiana, she might help boost a defense that ranks 10th in the league in steals per game.
What is an emergency hardship exceptions?
WNBA teams are allowed to sign a player to a hardship deal when the team drops below 10 eligible players. With numerous injuries, the Fever are below that threshold and were allowed to sign McDonald.
The deal will terminate when the team gets back to 10 active players. More than likely, that means that when Clark is ready to go, McDonald's time in Indiana will be up, barring additional injuries between now and then.
McDonald is the second player to sign a hardship deal this season. On May 20, the Sparks used a hardship on Notre Dame rookie Liatu King.