The NBA’s marketing season usually runs on one recycled script: a sneaker rotating in slow motion, a voiceover that sounds like it’s narrating a life-insurance commercial, and a star gazing into the middle distance as though he’s contemplating his own mortality. Then adidas handed Anthony Edwards a fake talk-show desk and a green light, and the whole tired genre got walked out to the curb.
The vehicle is a sketch series called “Minnatlantasota” — a mash-up of Ant’s Atlanta roots and his adopted Minnesota home. It launches the adidas AE3 “Cold Blooded,” which hits shelves today. New episodes drop on the fifth of every month all season, which means we’re going to get this on a schedule, like a utility bill you actually want to open. And in the first one, Ant does not warm up. He starts swinging.
He opens on the old guard. “He was gonna join me in Minnesota, but I guess his knees couldn’t handle the cold weather,” Edwards says of LeBron James landing in Philadelphia, before noting that “Philly’s got the best barbers in the world.” That’s the setup for the Jaylen Brown button: “between him and the old boy from Boston, they gonna have a whole lot of enhancements going on in the locker room,” a hairline joke delivered with the flat patience of a man who’s been rehearsing it in the mirror.
Then he pivots to his own backcourt. His read on new running mate LaMelo Ball is pure affection wrapped in a shiv: he’s thrilled about his new twin, but “one thing we ain’t doing is carpooling if he driving. I ain’t riding with him, y’all.” And for Jalen Brunson, the reigning-champ point guard everyone treats like a made man, Ant offers the coldest line in the whole bit: “If you on the court against me, anybody can get it. Even your daddy. I don’t care if he’s your assistant coach.” Rick Brunson, for the record, really does coach his son in New York.
Watch the thing for yourself:
https://x.com/adidasHoops/status/2100586756152414228
Here’s what I keep coming back to, though, and it’s got nothing to do with barbers.
We’ve spent decades in this market teaching ourselves to flinch. The good players left. The good years came with an asterisk stapled to them. So when the franchise’s meal ticket goes on camera and pokes four of the league’s biggest names in the eye — a former MVP, a Finals MVP, a max-money guard, and his own new co-star — the reflex around here is to expect the bulletin-board karma to arrive. That’s the historically conditioned move.
I’m not doing it this year, and I don’t think you should either.
That same confidence, the thing that makes the ad funny, is what’s about to make Ant the most important leadership experiment this franchise has run in a generation. He’s confident in the load-bearing sense, the kind that doesn’t check the room first. This is a young man who put up 28.8 points a night on 48.9 percent shooting last season and treats the idea that anyone in the sport is above a good roast as genuinely funny. You cannot fake that register. Cameras find the fraud in it every time.
And look at the room he’s walking into. Mike Conley signed in Boston over the summer. Randle’s in Brooklyn now, and Naz landed in Charlotte. Those were three important contributors from that recent conference-finals core, and they’re all wearing other logos now, while the ones who replaced them (LaMelo, Jonathan Kuminga, a rebuilt bench) are younger than the guys they replaced. Rudy Gobert still anchors the paint at 34, but nobody’s confusing Rudy for the emotional thermostat of a locker room. There is no graybeard left to hand the microphone to, and the leadership tax that used to get split three or four ways now lands on one desk.
Ant’s desk. The same one he’s cracking jokes behind.
That’s why the swagger is exactly what this job demands. A rebuilt roster full of new faces doesn’t need a franchise player who manages expectations. It needs one who sets the temperature in the building and never once wonders whether he’s allowed to. The guy who’ll tell Jalen Brunson’s dad he can get it on national television is the same guy who’ll walk into a February road game the Wolves have historically found a way to lose and simply refuse to treat it like a trap door.
None of that is proven yet. The tape that matters doesn’t drop on the fifth of the month. It drops October 21 in Miami, and it keeps dropping for 82.
But if you were worried this new-look group might tiptoe into the season unsure of who it belonged to, adidas just answered the question in the loudest way possible.
The man isn’t scared of anybody.
Good. Neither are we.
