Lin Dunn took over the Fever bench in 2008 with one organizing principle, which was that the basketball would be won at the defensive end or it would not be won at all. The next April, with the sixth pick in the 2009 WNBA Draft, Indiana selected a guard out of Arizona State named Briann January. She was twenty-two years old and she had been the best on-ball defender in the Pac-10 for two straight years. Dunn knew exactly what she was taking.
January was from Bellflower, California, by way of Tempe, where she had spent four years at Arizona State learning to take the air out of an opponent's lead guard before the offense ever got to its first option. She brought that habit with her to Indianapolis. The Fever did not need her to score. They needed her to make the other team's point guard work for every inch of the floor, and she did, night after night.
The 2012 championship is remembered for Tamika Catchings and the ring she had been chasing for a decade, and rightly so. But the championship was won at the defensive end of the floor. January was the front of the spear. She took the opposing point guard full-court when the matchup asked for it and she took it three-quarters when it did not, and the team behind her tightened because she had set the tone. The Fever beat Minnesota in four games. Indiana had its first title.
The WNBA noticed. January was named to the All-Defensive First Team in 2012 and she stayed on either the First or Second team for six straight seasons after that — a run no other guard in the league matched during that window. She made her first All-Star team in 2014. The defensive accolades kept coming long after she left Indianapolis; she earned a fifth First Team nod with the Connecticut Sun in 2021, almost a decade after the first one.
She spent nine seasons in a Fever uniform, the back half of the Catchings era, and she became the most prolific point guard in franchise history before she was traded to Phoenix in 2018. The offense Indiana ran in those years was Catchings and Tangela Smith and Katie Douglas. The identity was January, ninety-four feet of it, every possession.
The Vault keeps her here, at the point of the defensive spear, where she belongs.