Anthony Edwards spent his offseason doing the one thing this franchise almost never gets to do from the winning side of the table. He recruited.
Think about how rarely that sentence gets to be true around here. Kevin Garnett had to be shipped to Boston to get his ring. Kevin Love talked his way to Cleveland. Karl-Anthony Towns got packed off to New York about two years ago. For most of three decades the talent in Minnesota moved in exactly one direction, and it wasn’t toward us. The stars we grew here left to win somewhere warmer, somewhere the playoffs didn’t end in May.
So when Jonathan Kuminga, a 23-year-old with a fatter offer sitting on the table in Los Angeles, picks the Twin Cities in September, you’ll forgive a fan base that’s been trained to read good news as a setup for checking the receipt twice.
Jonathan Kuminga is a Timberwolf, two years and $12.4 million with a player option, and Edwards is a big reason why. He didn’t fire off a text and call it recruiting. Kuminga’s agent, Aaron Turner, told The Athletic that Ant was on the phone all summer while the Lakers, Bulls, and Blazers circled. Los Angeles had the fatter number on the table, a longer and richer deal than the two years Minnesota could put in front of him, and Kuminga passed on it anyway.
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And the pitch wasn’t about buckets. “Ant was super active in the recruitment of him,” Turner said. “One thing he did was focus his message on, we’re gonna really guard here.” Read that again, because it’s the whole tell. Every other suitor sold Kuminga a bigger scoring role. Edwards sold him a defense that would cover for the nights the shot won’t drop.
The line Turner passed along is the one that’ll stick: “I want you to come here and I want you to do everything you do and do it loudly. I feel where you’re coming from. I can understand what you’ve dealt with through these parts of your career and I want you to come in here and be Jonathan Kuminga.”
Ant knows exactly who he’s talking to. He played for Steve Kerr at the Paris Olympics and came home knowing what it feels like to be a young, explosive scorer waiting for the veterans to slide over. “Ant can relate to JK in a way very few, if any, in the world can,” Turner said. “Him saying, ‘I know what you can do’ meant a lot.” It helped that Edwards had watched it up close — Kuminga torched this exact defense in the 2025 playoffs, and Ant hadn’t forgotten any of it.
So that’s how he got here. The harder question is what he becomes once the recruiting stops and the roster math starts.
Here’s the fit as drawn up: Edwards and LaMelo Ball run the show, Kuminga starts at the four next to Rudy Gobert, and Jaden McDaniels handles the three. Ball is the reason the rest of it reshuffled. Minnesota pulled him out of Charlotte this summer, and his arrival is what slides McDaniels down a spot and opens the four for Kuminga. That’s a real starting five, and Kuminga is the piece that makes the versatility hum, a 6-foot-7 forward who can switch across three positions, run the floor in transition, and put a smaller defender through the backboard.
The case for it isn’t theoretical, and Wolves fans had the worst possible seat for the demonstration. In the 2025 Western Conference semifinals, Kuminga went for 20.8 points on 54.3 percent shooting across five games against this same Gobert-anchored wall. For long stretches he was the best young athlete on the floor, which is a hard thing to admit about the guy Minnesota needed all five of those games to send home.
Now the part nobody at the introductory presser will bring up. Kuminga is a career 33.2 percent shooter from three over 294 games, and that number has to go find room in a paint that already belongs to Gobert. Ant spent last spring staring down a second defender every time he turned the corner, because nobody could reliably make the arc hurt. Add another non-shooter to that picture and the geometry gets cramped in a hurry.
The counterweight is what’s missing. Donte DiVincenzo started all 82 games last season and then tore his Achilles in Game 4 against Denver. Somebody has to absorb those minutes and that shot creation. Kuminga doesn’t hand you DiVincenzo’s spacing, but he hands you something this roster has lacked: a self-generating scorer who doesn’t need a play called to get himself downhill.
That’s the bet. Not that Kuminga fixes the spacing. It’s that Ant saw something the rest of the league talked itself out of.
Because here’s what actually happened this week, underneath all the salary-cap arithmetic. A young star with real options looked at a defense he’d already beaten, a franchise that spent thirty years watching its best players walk out the door, and a phone that kept ringing all summer with the same voice on the other end.
He picked us.
Now Ant has to be right.
