First off, let’s not get anything twisted.
Anthony Edwards is the most important person in the Minnesota Timberwolves organization and the primary reason they are no longer a downtrodden franchise. He is a charismatic box office draw, genuinely generous in praise of his teammates, a diligent worker on his game in the offseason and in the process of setting up a compelling debate over whether he or Hall of Famer Kevin Garnett will eventually be regarded as the best player in Timberwolves history.
A player of that much talent, prestige and power bears a disproportionate burden for his team’s overall performance, a responsibility that requires a preponderance of self-accountability.
This feels like an especially propitious time, a real hinge moment, to examine the interwoven trajectories of Ant’s superstardom and the team’s fortunes. At age 24, he is approaching the prime of the exalted players he aspires to join — Derrick Rose won his first MVP award during his age 22 season, LeBron James and Giannis Antetokounmpo at 24, Kevin Durant at 25, and Steph Curry, Nikola Jokic and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander at 26. He has played in eight playoff series — first-round losses in the 2021-22 and 2022-23 postseasons, and winning two series before falling in the Western Conference Finals in both 2023-24 and 2024-25.
The Wolves entered the All-Star break in sixth place in the Western Conference thus far in the 2025-26 campaign, which is where they finished the regular season a year ago. During a press conference before the team’s first game back after the break against the Mavericks, head coach Chris Finch was asked by a writer from Dallas to compare this year’s Timberwolves with last season’s outfit.
“That’s a great question,” Finch replied. “We’ve got pretty high internal expectations. I think if you took the temperature of the team, we’d probably be a little bit disappointed. We feel we should be a little bit further ahead. We haven’t been able to capitalize off our young depth as much as we thought we would at the beginning of the season. Now (with the trade for Ayo Dosunmu) we feel like we’ve got bench strength. And we’ve been relatively healthy. We’ve just been inconsistent with our defense at times; that’s hurt us.
“So, I don’t know if we’re better,” Finch concluded. “We’ll measure that at the end of the season. But we know what we need to be when we are a good team. And sometimes we deviate from that.”
Couple those comments with what Finch was asked (by Jace Frederick of the Pioneer Press) after practice a day earlier: How important is Ant’s commitment to defense, especially now that the team is in the stretch run for momentum and positioning in the playoffs?
“Absolutely. I mean this is 26 games, one-third of your season left. This is the time — he has the capacity to be the best two-way player in the league. And when he is playing that way we are a whole other team, defensively. So he has really got to lean in and lead us in that way.”
It wasn’t the first time, and won’t be the last, that Finch has hammered on this point. But once again, Ant isn’t listening.
In the first half of the first game back from the break Friday evening, Ant’s defensive effort was perpetually shoddy.
With 6:21 left in the first quarter, he picked up point guard Tyus Jones at midcourt. Jones, four inches shorter, 29 pounds lighter and not nearly as quick, flat out beat him off the dribble for a layup.
At the 5:17 minute mark, backup point guard Brandon Williams blew past him for a floater that missed thanks to a rapid rotation from teammate Donte DiVincenzo.
At 4:32, Ant ignored his assignment of guarding Naji Marshall in the corner, enabling Marshall to receive a pass and beat him for a drive down the baseline, feeding the ball to center Marvin Bagley for a bucket after Ant’s teammate Rudy Gobert left Bagley to contest Marshall’s drive.
Ant subbed out two minutes later, returning with 9:39 left to play in the second period. Thirty-four seconds later, Marshall dribbled down in transition, toward Ant, who had hustled back to defend. But rather than challenge the shot or simply let him go, Ant gave him a little shove just after the successful shot was released, resulting in a three-point play.
With 5:24 to play in the first half, Ant ignored Caleb Martin in the corner, who cut behind him before a baseline feed for an unsuccessful layup because of Gobert’s rim protection.
At 3:05, Khris Middleton put a casual spin move around Ant and banked in a floater over Gobert’s shot contest.
At 2:29, Ant fails to box out Middleton, who grabs the offensive rebound and executes the putback.
And for the Mavericks final offensive possession of the first half, coach Jason Kidd cleared out one side of the half-court so that Middleton could be isolated on Ant. Middleton crab-dribbled his way down into the paint and then twirled for an uncontested six-footer that dropped through the hoop. On ESPN, color commentator Richard Jefferson remarked of Middleton, “He thought he was going to get more of a contest than he did.”
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None of this was scandalous. The Wolves went into the halftime locker room with a 12-point lead. Dallas shot only 37.5% from the floor, and just 25% from three-point range. The Wolves were +10 in the 18:51 that Ant played and +2 in the 5:09 he sat. He poured in 20 points.
When Anthony Edwards is engaged on defense, the Wolve are ‘a whole other team’
But that’s the point. Ant courts team failure by taking plays off on defense in situations when it feels like he can get away with it. But that gnaws at the fiber of teamwork, and leads back to Finch’s comments about deviating from what they know they are good at, and “being inconsistent on defense” before the All Star break, and why when Ant is engaged at that end of the floor they are “a whole other team on defense.”
This has been a chronic problem throughout Ant’s career, but it feels especially acute this season because two trips to the conference finals have upped the stakes and expectations, because Ant is theoretically more mature in year 6, and because Ant and the team specifically pledged that this would be a point of emphasis to fix a flaw heading into this season. Instead, if anything, the problem has gotten worse.
A somewhat crude but generally accurate way to measure it is to look at how many points the Wolves defense allows per 100 possessions when Ant is on the court compared with when he is off it. Through Sunday night, the team had allowed 6.6 more points per 100 possessions with Ant playing (114.4) than when he wasn’t playing (107.8). That’s the biggest gap of his career, with the next one being his rookie season (+6.1 more points allowed per 100 possessions) and then last season (+5.6).
Of course a lot of that is mitigated by Ant’s offensive prowess. The Wolves score 6.1 more points per 100 possessions with him on the court than when he is off. But the on/off gap on defense actually gives him a negative net rating (points scored minus points allowed when playing) of -0.5, lower than everyone in the nine-player rotation except for Mike Conley.
It would be absurd to claim that Ant’s net rating is a measure of his value relative to his teammates. The point here is to note that a superstar universally regarded as one of the best on-ball defenders in the league underperforms chronically enough to produce those on/off numbers, and why that is a legitimate source of concern down the stretch of the regular season and heading into the 2026 playoffs.
An axiom of the NBA is that a team takes on the personality of its superstar. That may explain why the Wolves have beaten both of the two best teams in the West thus far this season, the Thunder and the Spurs, twice in three games, while suffering inexplicable losses and close calls to inferior competition.
The inverse of Ant mailing in his defensive effort in the first half against a quasi-tanking opponent like the Mavericks is Ant rising to the occasion and elevating his game when the stakes are highest. And the good news this season is that he has honed his already phenomenal package of skills on offense to become more deliberatively effective in the clutch, game-deciding moments of mundane regular season games as well as showcase matchups and playoff tilts.
And again, the first game back from the break against Dallas provides a handy example.
The Wolves demonstrated that they didn’t need Ant’s presence to fall asleep on defense but he was vital to energizing what Finch called a “rusty” offense in the first five minutes of the fourth quarter.
Put simply the score went from 96-88 Timberwolves at the start of the final stanza to a tie game at 103 when Finch reinserted him with 6:55 left to play.
The definition of “clutch” situations in the NBA is when teams are within five points of each other with five minutes or less to play in the fourth quarter and any overtime that might be required. So it didn’t officially count in Ant’s clutch statistics when he came down and drilled a step-back three-pointer over PJ Washington 17 seconds after checking in. But it did register as “clutch” when he faced down Washington again, with his now signature cat-and-mouse crossover dribble, and, instead of stepping back, put it into overdrive to get past Washington and hit a lefty floater over center Daniel Gafford with 4:49 left to play.
Official “clutch time” bobbed and weaved the rest of the way, as Ant drove left with a fervor that promised another layup, only to stop on a dime as the defender shot past and kiss an 11-foot turnaround banker off the glass with his team up 4 and 3:05 to go. Then willed his way to the paint right in front of the rim for a soft floater from seven-feet out with his team up 6 at 2:27.
And it wasn’t “clutch” when he drove and stopped at the right elbow by the foul line for an 11-footer. But with the Wolves now up by eight points with 1:18 left to play, it was the dagger. The three-pointer from the left corner — points 38, 39 and 40; 20 for each half — was the cherry on top.
When Ant was named one of the three finalists for clutch player of the year last season, it was hard to take it seriously. Over 160.4 minutes, he shot 56% from two-point range (28-50) and just 32.3 from behind the arc (21-65) for a composite 42.6% from the field as the Wolves went 19-23 and were -51 when he was on the court.
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When I conducted my annual preseason interview with Finch last fall, he mentioned that more deliberate clutch play from Ant was a priority coming into this season.
“We have got to get Anthony to different spots on the floor, where he feels comfortable with a go-to move,” Finch said back then.
Mission accomplished.
Ant has leveraged a massive improvement in his footwork with a more planful — but not less forceful — varied attack to keep opposing defenders in a pick-your-poison situation. As the recent fourth quarter against Dallas attests, he can burn you with a step-back trey, bull-rush his way to the rim, and, opening up a whole new bag of tricks, use the threat of treys and layups to wheedle himself open from specific midrange spots on the court, generally in the elbows along the foul line and from 7-10 feet out on pull-ups, turnarounds and lean-in jumpers.
In what are by definition the most pressurized, highest-leverage moments on the court, he is shooting an astounding 75% (33-44) from two-point range and 36.7% (11-30) from deep. That’s a composite 59.5% from the field, best among all players with at least 35 field goal attempts in the clutch. His 69.5 true shooting percentage is also tops in that cohort. The Wolves are 11-9 in clutch games he has played this season, and +8 with him on the court.
“Ant was awesome,” Finch raved after beating the Mavericks. When asked to elaborate on his superstar’s growth in clutch moments, he added that Ant “put the work in during the summer; no doubt about it. It was the one thing he wanted to do this year, was to get himself a repeatable shot, in the midrange most likely. Be able to get to it time and again and clean.
“Generally he has tried, up until this season, to close with the three-point shot. And now he is mixing it up, getting to his clean midrange, to the rim, he can take his three, too. So, he knows. He is using the clock for the most part, really smart, taking his time to go. He is aware when they are coming to double and wait, he has got a good feel on when to invite that, and that initiates the offense too.”
Two nights later, the Wolves played the Philadelphia 76ers without Gobert (suspended for too many flagrant fouls) and Naz Reid (sore shoulder). Ant scored 28 points but there was to be no clutch time, as the Sixers ran away with the game by the score of 135-108. After the game, Finch railed against a lack of effort on defense, especially the “short closeouts” — not running hard all the way to the shooter to put pressure on his shot — that enabled Philadelphia to make 21-of-37 from long distance, a whopping 56.8%.
In the locker room afterward, Jon Krawzynski of The Athletic repeated Finch’s criticism and asked Ant what he thought was the cause of that.
“Most of the time it was me,” Ant replied.
Such honest verbal accountability is admirable, and very familiar by now. But less impressive with each repetition over the years.
One might wonder why Finch doesn’t hold Ant more directly accountable by calling him out or even giving him a punitive bench stint. The answer can be found at the top of this column: Anthony Edwards is the most important person in the Minnesota Timberwolves organization, and Finch is right to prioritize Ant’s desire to stay and play here. (It is definitely more defensible than the coach’s steadfast loyalty to the custody of Julian Randle’s temperament.)
We don’t know what is said and done behind the scenes, but we do know that Ant has in the past conceded the error of his ways and the accuracy of Finch’s criticisms — both he and Randle definitely have the coach’s back.
That’s a prerequisite for success but still leaves a long way to go before the Wolves have a legitimate shot at hoisting the championship trophy. Anthony Edwards, superstar, has dramatically honed and improved an element of his game every season he has been in the league. But until he is in a serious conversation as to who are the best two-way players in the NBA, the Wolves won’t come close to reaching that high bar.
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