How Anthony Edwards’ hero-ball evolution began with Kobe and Michael Jordan

TWO DAYS AFTER what Anthony Edwards termed the “most important game” of his career, securing a win against the Golden State Warriors to avoid an 2-0 hole in the Western Conference semifinals, the Minnesota Timberwolves star again found his team in another fight, on the road for Game 3.

With “Playoff Jimmy” Butler fully engaged, returning to the primary scorer role he’d mastered in Miami, Edwards — the league’s No. 4 leading scorer in the regular season — began to simmer. Butler had scored 18 first-half points, leading his Stephen Curry-less squad to a two-point halftime lead.

Edwards, for his part, had scored only eight points in the first half, on 3-for-12 shooting, including 1-for-6 on 3-pointers. The Wolves had been outscored by 11 points during his 20 minutes on the court.

But then, as he so often does, the 23-year-old All-Star came out firing, his supreme skill and elite athleticism often leaving even an 18-year veteran such as Wolves point guard Mike Conley in awe.

“There’s moments where I’ll go home and I’ll sit there and [think] I could be, right now in this moment, [in the midst of] being a teammate of one of the best players that ever played this game,” Conley told ESPN.

Edwards didn’t just score points — 28 in the second half alone — there was panache in how he did it. His second-half highlight reel was a reminder of why the chiseled 6-foot-4, 225-pound shooting guard has already evoked comparisons to Michael Jordan.

There was his dunk, his team trailing by five late in the third quarter, when he launched from the semi-circle just inside the free throw line and finished with a right-handed hammer that reduced the Warriors’ 6-9 power forward Kevon Looney to the basketball equivalent of a smashed bug on a windshield.

And there was his 3-pointer, his team down six early in the fourth, when Warriors guard Brandin Podziemski refused to cede him any space, so Edwards simply created some, stepping back and reaching the peak of his leap before releasing his jumper.

And then there was perhaps his most critical play.

On the left wing, Edwards was triple-teamed by Butler, Looney and Podziemski. Given his obvious offensive rhythm, it would have surprised no one to see him rise and fire over the trio.

Instead, he fed an open Julius Randle at the top of the key with the ball then swung to the right wing to get Jaden McDaniels a clean look at a 3 to put Minnesota up six with 3:20 remaining. Golden State never cut it closer than four after that.

There was no official statistic associated with the play by Edwards. Randle got credit for the assist. But the sequence was a tangible example of Edwards’ real-time evolution as an all-around threat, with his decision-making fueling the Wolves’ improbable turnaround from one of the NBA’s least reliable teams in clutch time to one of its most.

Minnesota has posted a 4-0 record in games featuring clutch time this postseason, outscoring their opponents 45-16 in those minutes, according to ESPN Research.

Edwards has 15 points on 4-for-7 shooting in his 14 postseason clutch minutes, and he has fortified that effort with five assists and no turnovers — the most assists without a turnover in clutch time by any player in the 2025 playoffs.

“My trainer [Chris] Hines always tells me, ‘Michael Jordan had Steve Kerr,'” Edwards told ESPN. “He always tells me stuff like that. So, it’s just being able to trust my teammates.”

But for as natural as it might look for Edwards now, it has been a seasonlong process to get him there.

FIVE MONTHS AGO, Edwards stepped into the Chase Center for the second night of a home-and-home series against the Golden State Warriors. The Wolves lost 114-106, dropping their season record to 12-11 — and Edwards was a primary reason why.

After shooting them back into the game in the third quarter, scoring 15 points on 6-for-8 shooting, and hitting a go-ahead 3 with 4:47 to go in the fourth, he proceeded to shoot his team out of it. In crunch time, he shot 0-for-6 with a turnover. The Warriors closed on a 9-0 run.

The Wolves had seen this before.

“In the last five minutes, he just wanted to score, score, score because he wanted to prove to the Warriors that he can knock ’em out,” Minnesota coach Chris Finch told ESPN. “He came into the team afterwards and he apologized. He said, ‘That’s on me.’ He just stopped kind of creating for everybody down the stretch.”

What exacerbated Finch’s frustration was the fact that only two days earlier, the Wolves had beaten the Warriors handily, with Edwards scoring 30 points and dishing nine assists.

“He played an amazing game,” Finch said.

Hines remembers that loss — and lessons derived from it.

“He’s the kid that you tell him not to eat chocolate and he’s got chocolate on his face,” Hines told ESPN. “And you’re like, ‘Hey dude, did you just eat the chocolate?’ He’s like, ‘No.’ We just told you dude, don’t eat the chocolate! So that’s him.”

Still, as blatantly poor as his late-game execution was, his teammates gravitated toward him.

“That was part of our growth as a team,” Randle told ESPN. “And it really wasn’t on him. He was like, ‘F it, let me try to will our team to a win.’ He’s the ultimate competitor. But he was able to recognize, ‘Hey man, I got to be better.’ That’s just who Ant is. He’s not hesitant to take the blame — and obviously he is going to get praise — but he constantly wants to get better.”

Hines says he knows Edwards sees himself as an alpha and gravitates toward killer competitors like Jordan and Kobe Bryant. But all of Jordan’s six championships came before Edwards was born. And his birthday was two months after Bryant’s second title in L.A. So Hines is still educating Edwards about their games, beyond the dunks and game-winners that still flood social media.

“Jordan had Steve Kerr,” Hines said. “He had [John] Paxson. LeBron [James] had Boobie Gibson at times. Guys who would really make these shots, timely shots. The [Robert] Horrys and whatnot, throughout the history of the game. And if he doesn’t study that type of stuff, then he’s going to keep bumping his head against a brick wall.

“So it’s been a good transition for him to see it. We’ll watch clips of Kobe when he hits Rick Fox [with a pass]. Ant’s like, ‘Who’s Rick Fox?’ He had no clue who Rick Fox is. But he sees he hit the shot. So he’s getting a really good understanding of the history of the game and how it’s repeating itself [with him].”

Edwards acknowledges he has struggled to evolve beyond his hero-ball tendencies.

“My first couple of times in the playoffs down the stretch, I always just wanted to win the game myself,” Edwards said. “Because growing up, when you watch the games, you always think like, ‘Oh, they always hit the big shots!’ But sometimes they make the extra pass, the right play.”

BUT FOR AS much as he still strives to match the late-game heroics or Jordan and Bryant, he is 0-for-15 (0-for-10 on 3s) in his regular-season career on tying or go-ahead shots in the final 10 seconds of the fourth quarter or overtime, according to ESPN Research. Including the playoffs, he’s 1-for-18.

This season, Minnesota stumbled to a 20-26 record in close games — the second most clutch-time losses in the league — and Edwards was a main factor. He was 0-for-7 on those tying or go-ahead shots — the most such attempts without a make in the league this season and tied for the most without a make in the past five seasons.

Edwards’ coaches and teammates are not aiming to disable what drives him to want to take over, they say. It’s a shift, another dimension, while also providing him with all the defensive coverages he is bound to see.

He’s learning.

“That’s the balance he’s been having to deal with because he’s a go, go, go kind of guy,” Conley said. “And we tell him all the time, we want him to be aggressive to score. Don’t even think about us as, ‘Oh, let me try to get Mike the ball.’ I think that’s when he slows down a little bit, when he’s like, ‘Oh, I just need to pass it.’ He becomes just a passer.

“So it’s just about getting him to understand, stay in an attacking mode, be aggressive all the time, but while you’re doing that, can you process it? Can you pick it up when you see somebody last minute come over to help, you know where your outlet is? And I think that’s where he’s getting to.”

It’s not intuitive just yet. “Every three possessions, I’m going to shoot one out of three,” Edwards said. “Especially down the stretch.”

The metronome in his mind reminds him: pass, pass, shoot. Or shoot, pass, pass. Or pass, shoot, pass. He has been motivated to give up the ball, too, because he has worked on optimizing his catch-and-shoot jumpers. Playing like the proverbial Kerr, not just passing to him.

He picked that up last summer, when he was coached by Kerr at the Olympics, and teamed with Curry, James and his idol, Kevin Durant.

“KD told me being able to catch and shoot the ball is going to be the biggest thing for me,” Edwards said.

Sometimes it’s the messenger, and not the message.

“We’ve been trying to get him to do that for a number of years because the numbers were so good,” Finch said. “He was such a good catch-and-shoot shooter, but he had always played with this rhythm with the ball in his hands, tried to generate his own shot off the dribble. So I think it felt a little uncomfortable, even though he had great success.”

His success in Paris last summer, winning a gold medal, changed him for the better, his teammates say.

“He talks about Team USA more than he’s talked about anything. And he talks a lot,” Conley said. “I think it opened up a new world for him.”

At the same time, it only strengthened his worldview. “[It] put him in a realm of, ‘Look, they’re just like me. F—, I’m [actually] better,’ in his head,” Hines said.

As his evolution continues, Edwards has the Wolves one win away from a second straight conference finals appearance. He assisted Conley on a 3 with 1:22 left in Game 5 of the first round to close out the Lakers; but he’s still the guy who scored 16 of his 30 points in the third quarter of Game 4 of the second round to give the Wolves a 3-1 lead over the Warriors.

And the Wolves believe he can be the player to finally lead them to the first championship in the 36-year history of the franchise.

“I have been around a lot of great players. He is as confident in his belief in himself as … it’s Kobe-like. And I was around Kobe,” Randle told ESPN.

“He’s not scared of any moment and he wants those moments. His belief and confidence in who he is as a player is the highest I’ve ever seen or been around, for anybody.”

As Edwards has grown to trust the teammates around him, they’ve committed to trusting him right back.

“We preach to him: ‘Make the right play, make the right play,'” Finch said. “Ant said to me one time, ‘Maybe I’m the right play.’

“And he’s not wrong.”

Source: espn.com