Anthony Edwards is constantly proving that he is truly built differently during the long haul of his fourth NBA season. Opponents constantly hit, batter, and bruise the 22-year-old who doesn’t believe in mortality throughout the Minnesota Timberwolves’ renaissance season. Half a dozen times or more this season, Edwards has knocked knees, twisted his ankle, or fallen hard to the court so severely that Wolves fans feared the worst and assumed the season was lost. Only, he bounces back up or, at worst, heads to the locker room for a quick tape job. Then Edwards checks right back into the game and continues like nothing happened. He looks like he’s made of titanium or Teflon. He can shrug off any injury that would be catastrophic to a normal human.
Edwards has only missed 16 out of a possible 312 games. He also has never missed more than six games in a row, and his longest stretch was when COVID-19 forced him out of action in December 2021. He’s played in 73 of Minnesota’s 76 games this year, only missing time early in the season due to a minor hip injury. He’s railed against load management, and it seems like he wants to play every minute of every game for the franchise that drafted him first overall in 2020.
But the Timberwolves are barreling towards the postseason as favorites to make a deep run for the first time since 2004. With Karl-Anthony Towns still rehabbing from a meniscus injury, it may be in Chris Finch’s best interest to give his superstar some much-needed rest and relaxation before the playoffs begin.
Although he had a get-right game against the depleted and tanking Toronto Raptors on Wednesday with 28 points, six assists, three rebounds, and five made threes, Edwards hasn’t looked like his usual self lately. Before the Raptors laid down in the middle of the street, Ant was 0-19 from three in his previous three outings and looked like he didn’t have his legs under him to get the proper arch on his shot. He said as much after Easter Sunday’s loss to Chicago, in which Edwards shot 0-5 from deep and finished the game with six costly turnovers. It goes against everything we’ve seen from Edwards’ superhuman ascent up the NBA superstar pyramid, but what if the man is just tired?
Edwards is eighth in the NBA in total minutes played this season and 17th in minutes played per game. He also finished second and tenth in each category last year. Edwards spent much of his summer with Team USA, playing a crucial role in a fourth-place finish during the 2023 FIBA Basketball World Cup. Along with his second All-Star selection, Edwards has been playing high-level basketball without much of a break since August. His minutes have ticked up from 35.2 per game to 36.5 per contest since Towns has been out of the lineup nursing his injury. With the playoffs fast approaching, where rotations tighten and stars play heavy minutes every night, Chris Finch should be looking for any opening to get his star player a breather.
Hindsight is 20-20, but Finch may have missed his best opportunity to give Edwards a day off against the tanking Raptors. Mike Conley, 36, got the rest instead. But knowing the outcome would be a 48-point beatdown, perhaps Finch could have rolled the dice and sat Edwards and Conley and trusted Naz Reid, Rudy Gobert, Jaden McDaniels, and the rest of the role players to beat a team that doesn’t want anything to do with winning at this point in the season.
The Wolves have a moderately tough schedule with six games remaining. They will play the Phoenix Suns (twice), Los Angeles Lakers, Washington Wizards, Denver Nuggets, and Atlanta Hawks to round out the regular season. Perhaps the front-end of a back-to-back at home against Washington on April 9th before heading to Denver for a showdown for the top seed with the Nuggets on the 10th would be the opportune time to sit Edwards without impacting Minnesota’s bid for the highest possible seed.
Washington is 15-62 and has no incentive to win more games this season. Even without Edwards, the Wolves would still have a large talent disparity, and they have shown they can handle business when their stars are out. Minnesota is 2-1 with Edwards out of the lineup this year. They’re 3-1 if you count the win against the Memphis Grizzlies on November 28th, in which Edwards exited three minutes and 43 seconds into the game and did not return. They’re also 12-4 without Towns this season, showing their depth of talent. Last year, the Timberwolves sputtered when Towns went down with a calf injury for 52 games.
There’s only one game between the first and third seeds, so every game matters down the stretch. Edwards is the driving force behind Minnesota’s resurgence this season, but it might be the right time to pull off the road and rest up before the drive to the NBA Finals kicks up a notch. Edwards will probably resist any suggestion that he sit out a game that he would otherwise be healthy enough to play in, but it might be best for the team to be rested as much as possible at the end of a grueling season.
