The Minnesota Timberwolves are Anthony Edwards’ team now. D’Angelo Russell is in Los Angeles, leaving Edwards without another offensive co-star until Karl-Anthony Towns returns from injury. Sunday night’s game against the Golden State Warriors was the test case for the struggles that Edwards will face down the stretch of the season. All eyes will be on him without Russell or a healthy Towns. Defenses will hone in on Ant and the pressure he will be under has never been higher.
Bringing Mike Conley into the fold gives the Timberwolves a better connector at point guard. He brings unselfishness to the position and a willingness to get his teammates involved — most importantly Rudy Gobert. Conley may be the glue that can hold pieces of this team together, but I fear the makeup of their structure is too fragile to be fixed by glue. It seems the Wolves are missing pieces of their foundation. The goal of basketball games is to score more points than your opponent, something that Minnesota will struggle to do while Ant figures out how to be The Guy.
That’s a lot to expect from a third-year player. Ant has clearly taken some huge steps forward in his development in the last few months, but is he ready to lead a team to the playoffs?
The Towns-less Wolves remind me a bit of the mid-2010s Houston Rockets team during the height of James Harden helio-ball. The idea is that if you surround a dynamic offensive force of Harden’s level with defenders and knockdown shooters, his ability to create offense for himself and others is a recipe for great success. And the Rockets were great. From 2013 to 2020, Houston was a playoff mainstay, winning hundreds of games and consistently being a threat to finish with the best record in the regular season. I’m using Harden as an example here, and while I understand that he’s one of the best versions of helio-centric players in modern vintage, his statistical profile provides an ideal blueprint for the type of player that Ant will need to mimic if he hopes to lead the KAT-less Wolves to the playoffs.
Though the idea of the Wolves looking like those Rockets teams is nice, there are a few glaring issues. First, those Rockets teams fired off three-point shots at an insane rate. During that seven-year run, Houston never ranked lower than second in the league in three-point attempts. Three-point shooting has been a Timberwolves bugaboo all season. Although Minnesota’s three-point attempt rate has improved over the course of the season, they still rank just 12th in the league in attempts.
Second, Anthony Edwards is not James Harden. Don’t get me wrong, Ant has been incredible for stretches this season and looks to be on a trajectory to super-stardom. But asking him to carry the load of a top-tier NBA offense by himself is a lot to put on the 21-year-old. Harden was the center of the universe in Houston. During the seven-year run from 2013 to 2020, Harden averaged a 34% usage rate, ballooning all the way to 40% in 2018. Edwards’ usage rate is trending upward as he’s become the primary option in Minnesota. In five games without Russell, he’s averaged 31% usage.
Edwards seems to welcome the increase in usage as he’s eclipsed 30 points twice in those five games. But we’ve also seen him fail to score 20 in two of the five. Although Ant may be able to bump up his usage, there is an efficiency gap between him and other high-leverage offensive players — in this example, prime James Harden — that will be a large hurdle he will have to overcome. Currently, Edwards has a 56.6 true shooting percentage. That’s fairly efficient for him considering his particularly difficult shot diet, but still a tick below league average of 58%. Harden’s true shooting was 61.3% during his time in Houston, a mark of efficiency that Ant hasn’t yet come close to.
Ant has yet to fill some significant gaps in his game. We should expect that he will take some lumps as defenses focus their attention solely on him while Towns is out. The last month of the season should inform us about where Ant is as a primary option. He’ll be seeing increasingly more double teams. Defenses will shift to overload him when the ball is in his hands, forcing him to step up offensively.
So far in his career, Ant has learned quickly. From starting his rookie season on the bench to making an All-Star game in Year 3, we’ve already seen so much growth from him. Now is the time for him to show whether he’s ready for the next step in his development, or if the Wolves need to go back to the drawing board in their attempts to build a championship contender around Edwards.
