Any talk about the Minnesota Timberwolves leading into the 2025-26 NBA season begins with Anthony Edwards.
The 24-year-old dynamo is entering Year 6 in the NBA on the back of consecutive trips to the Western Conference Finals. He’s a two-time All-NBA second team selection, three-time All-Star, and is on the cusp of becoming the face of the NBA. While his contemporaries spent the offseason cooking up idiotic social media fakeout advertising opportunities, Anthony Edwards was presenting Timothee Chalamet his ‘White Boy of the Year’ award for the inaugural Believe That Awards.
On the court, the conversation about Edwards centers around whether he’s ready to take the next and final step of his evolution and become a bona fide MVP candidate. Edwards has finished 7th in MVP voting the last two seasons. He averaged a career high 27.6 points per game last season while also grabbing 5.7 rebounds and dishing out 4.5 assists per game for a Timberwolves team that won 49 games and beat the Los Angeles Lakers and Golden State Warriors in the playoffs before running into the 68-win and eventual champion Oklahoma City Thunder in the conference finals.
If Edwards wants to become the second MVP in franchise history after Kevin Garnett previously won in 2004, he’ll have to raise his game once more to be etched in history alongside the all-time greats on the Michael Jordan Trophy.
There have been 25 MVP awards given out in seasons that have begun this century. Among the recipients are the greatest players of this generation: Nikola Jokic, Steph Curry, LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, and, most recently, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
If you average out each MVP season from the last 25 years, Ant has his work cut out for him. MVP winners from the 2000s averaged 76 games played, 27.1 points per game, 8.6 rebounds, and 6.7 assists. You can thank the handiwork of Tim Duncan and Kevin Garnett in the early years of the century for the inflated rebounding numbers, and Steve Nash and his back-to-back MVP seasons in 2005 and 2006 for the high assist totals.
The good news for Ant is that he has already met two of these four simple metrics. Edwards has played an average of 76.2 games per season through his first five seasons in the NBA, including all 72 games in his COVID-shortened rookie season in 2020-21. Edwards has appeared in 79 games in each of his last three seasons. He’s one of the most durable stars in the league and seems to be made of adamantium whenever he rolls an ankle and heads to the locker room. Wolves fans almost instinctively know he’s going to be just fine.
Along with durability, Ant has the scoring down. He was second in total points scored last season and fourth in scoring average behind three former MVPs, SGA, Giannis, and Jokic. His career average is 23.9, and he has bumped his scoring average by at least 1.3 points per game every season. That minimum increase would put him at 28.9 points per game this season.
He’s likely never going to hit 8.6 rebounds. Still, that number is artificially high due to the run of power forwards and centers dominating the award at the beginning and end of the quarter-century. Kobe won MVP in 2008, averaging 6.3 rebounds per game, which would be a realistic number for the 6’4” Edwards to shoot for.
Improved playmaking could really vault Anthony Edwards into the MVP conversation. Edwards has turned himself from a true shoot-first, ask-questions-later gunner in his first couple of seasons into a good, not great, passer and secondary playmaker in Chris Finch’s offense.
He’s averaging 4.7 assists per game over his last three seasons and would likely need to get that over five to be in the MVP conversation as a guard. He needs to work on his efficiency shooting just 50.1 percent on twos last year and turn the ball over less. A stat line of 30 points, six rebounds, five assists while shooting 47/40/85 with fewer than three turnovers per game should ensure Anthony Edwards is an MVP finalist at season’s end.
Individual statistics are only part of an MVP resume. 25 players in the league can put up MVP numbers on a bad team, but team results factor equally into the race. The Timberwolves are going to have to win a lot of games in the regular season to prop Ant up as a potential MVP.
The previous MVPs played for teams that averaged 59.9 wins, pro-rated to an 82-game season. All but four were on the first- or second-seeded team in their conference. Two played for the third seed, and Nikola Jokic and Russell Westbrook had great seasons on a six seed. Minnesota has never won 60 games in franchise history. They won 56 games two seasons ago and fumbled the top seed down the stretch.
Last year, things got off to a slow start until Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo clicked into place down the stretch, and Minnesota won 49 games and secured the sixth seed. Minnesota’s over-under this season is either 49.5 or 50.5, which is fourth in the West behind Oklahoma City, Houston, and Denver. If they finish fourth with 50 wins, Ant has no chance at MVP. They’ll need a Herculean effort from everyone on the roster to squeeze everything out of the regular season.
Vegas has Ant’s odds to win MVP at +2500, which is sixth best to start the new season. For him to rise above and win his first MVP award, Anthony Edwards will need to average close to 30, 6, and 5 per game with a career-high shooting efficiency, play at least 75 games, and lead the Timberwolves to 60 wins and a top-two seed in the West. If he can accomplish this, he will be the youngest MVP since Giannis won his first in the 2018-19 season.
