The Indiana Fever are firing general manager Amber Cox, Annie Costabile of The Athletic reported Friday afternoon.
The move comes hours after the organization announced that president Kelly Krauskopf was stepping down, and marks two drastic front office changes on the heels of the Fever’s disappointing playoff exit. Cox was brought on in 2024 as Indiana’s GM and chief operating officer. She previously worked in executive roles at the Wings (2022 to ‘24) and the Sun (2016 to ‘21).
The Fever’s 2026 season ended in a first-round playoff loss to the defending champ Aces. It’s the second time Indiana has bowed out in the first round since drafting Caitlin Clark in ‘24; the farthest the team has gotten in the postseason in recent history was actually during Clark’s injury-ravaged sophomore campaign in ‘25, when Indiana got knocked out by the Aces in a best-of-five semifinals series.
BRENNAN: Something’s Got to Give With the Indiana Fever
Even after Clark’s two healthy campaigns, the Fever haven’t gotten close to winning a championship. While her draft-class contemporary Angel Reese is playing in this year’s WNBA Finals, Clark has won just one playoff game and played in five in her career. Three seasons into Clark’s WNBA tenure, the Fever are on the clock to deliver more prolific postseason success, and now they’re dutifully seeking fresh faces and minds to build a legitimate title-contending roster.
Just three weeks ago, Cox addressed the narratives surrounding criticism of the Fever’s fanbase during the team’s exit interviews.
“The attacks on our fanbase have no basis in reality, and they need to stop …,” Cox said on Oct. 3. “Every organization throughout professional sports has to deal with occasional bad behavior with spectators. Anyone who crosses the line needs to be held accountable. There’s a line, and people need to be held accountable. However, we didn’t have one fan pointed out by a player who violated the WNBA’s code of conduct this season.”
One of the Fever’s former players, Brianna Turner, directly responded to Cox and called the then-Indiana GM’s statement “unequivocally false.”
“Players inside and outside the organization have repeatedly issued complaints with the Fever Fanbase. While it’s not all Indy fans, it’s certainly a trend. To say the attacks have ‘no basis in reality’ is disingenuous,” Turner wrote on X.
BRENNAN: What Will It Take for Caitlin Clark, Fever to Keep Kelsey Mitchell in Indy?
All season long, the Fever have been at the center of non-basketball discourse and racially motivated narratives often propagated by people with political agendas. In June, Clark was on the receiving end of a flagrant foul by Mercury’s Alyssa Thomas, a storyline that ended up driving the WNBA news cycle for weeks on end. Thomas later admitted she received death threats following the incident. In late July, Sophie Cunningham spoke about her opposition to transgender women and girls participating in sports in an ESPN profile that has since given way to a firestorm of controversy that refuses to die down. In Game 2 of the Fever-Aces playoff series in September, Aces star A’ja Wilson got into a heated exchange with a courtside fan at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, another hot-topic story that quickly spiraled out of hand and snowballed into a nationwide blame game.
If the team does, as Cunningham put it, want to “get back to basketball,” something will have to change for 2027 and beyond. Ahead of a pivotal free agency, the Fever have already taken two large strides into the future by parting ways with Cox and Krauskopf. The next two front office leaders, whomever they might be, will be tasked with not only handling with Clark’s EPIC extension and Kelsey Mitchell’s looming departure, but also handling all the outside noise that comes with the spotlit Fever organization.
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