Unity 3d shooter tutorial animation

Question

I'm following this tutorial. I cannot get even simple animations to work. Here's a very simple case that was supposed to work but did not:

1. Add an animator component to the 'player' prefab
2. Create an animator controller and drag it to the corresponding field in the player animator component.
3. Open the 'animator' tab (right click on animator controller -> open), and drag an animation clip. This automatically becomes the default state.
4. Click play. Nothing happens. In the animator tab I can see a blue progress bar in the 'default' state (the only animation I dragged to the state machine). But the game screen shows no animation.

The player prefab inspector:

The very simple state machine

This is driving me nuts.

Answer 1

Removing the player prefab and re-adding it did the trick When I added the player again, the 'player' avatar was automatically assigned to it. I did not have to do it manually. And this 'magically' solved the issue somehow.