Pokey Chatman took the Indiana Fever job in November 2016, two months after Tamika Catchings played the last game of her life in a Fever uniform. The franchise that had been to the playoffs twelve straight seasons handed her the keys the year the engine went cold. Stephanie White had left for Vanderbilt. Catchings had retired. The cupboard, as the saying goes, was not full.
What she had to work with, in 2017, was a roster in transition and a fan base that did not yet understand how long the transition would last. Tamika Catchings the player was gone. Briann January and Erlana Larkins were the holdovers. The team went 9 — 25 her first year. They went 6 — 28 her second — the worst Fever record to that point. In 2019, with a younger roster and a clearer plan, they finished 13 — 21, two games out of the playoffs. That was the floor of the era, and it was also the most hopeful the franchise looked in three years.
She had earned the chair the long way. She spent twenty years at LSU — point guard, student assistant, assistant, head coach — and took the Lady Tigers to three straight Final Fours in 2004, 2005, and 2006. She resigned in March 2007 under the shadow of an alleged inappropriate relationship with a former player, given, by her own account, two hours to step down. She settled with LSU for $160,000 and disappeared from American basketball for three years.
What she did next was build a different kind of resume. She went to Russia, took the assistant job at Spartak Moscow Region under Natalia Hejkova, and won four straight EuroLeague championships. She was promoted to head coach for 2009-10 and went 16 — 0 in EuroLeague play. The Chicago Sky hired her in October 2010 as GM and head coach. In six seasons she went 106 — 98, took the Sky to the franchise's first playoff appearance, ran off four straight postseason trips, and got them to the 2014 WNBA Finals. She was let go in October 2016. Indiana hired her a month later.
The Fever fired her, and the general manager title that came with the head-coaching job, on September 10, 2019. The 28 — 74 record was the line in the press release. The truer line was that the franchise had asked her to rebuild around a Cade that hadn't arrived yet, with a draft hand that didn't cooperate, in an era no Indiana coach was going to win in. She took the assistant job with the Seattle Storm in 2022 and has been a steady second voice on a contending bench ever since.
The Vault keeps her here because someone had to coach the post-Catchings desert, and she did it with the resume of a person who had won everywhere she had been allowed to stay. The record will read 28 — 74. The job, as it was handed to her, did not have a better number in it.