Anthony Edwards spent the back half of last week in Manila on an adidas tour stop, riding to a fan festival in a custom jeepney, wearing a barong and a Gilas Pilipinas jersey in front of a crowd that had been waiting years to see him in person. Somewhere in there he sat down with ESPN Philippines and casually rearranged the Western Conference.
“Against those two teams, I think we’re going to beat them.”
Those two teams being Oklahoma City and San Antonio, and that is the whole quote. It needed no help traveling. By Sunday morning in Minnesota, Ant had the word “guarantee” welded to his name and San Antonio had a fresh reason to circle Halloween.
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What lifts it above a news cycle is the specificity. Those are precisely the two teams that closed the last two Minnesota springs. The Thunder ended the 2025 run in the conference finals. The Spurs ended this past one in the second round, and they finished the job with a 139-109 Game 6 on May 15 that felt less like an elimination than a public inventory of everything the roster couldn’t do. Ant did not pull two contenders out of a hat. He named the two doors he has been walked out of.
The half of the answer nobody clipped
Later in the same conversation he was asked what a championship would mean, and the answer went somewhere entirely different.
“It would mean a lot [to win a championship]… But right now, I don’t think we’re thinking about winning the championship. It’s step by step. We got LaMelo, a new player, and a bunch of new pieces. So, we are just trying to build it together and I think we’re trying to gel it all together.”
One sitting. He guarantees he beats the two best teams in his conference, then declines to discuss the trophy at all. Those two answers should cancel each other out. Put them side by side instead and you get something more useful than either alone: a player who just turned 25 and believes in the ceiling and has not started lying to himself about the staircase.
I have heard a lot of August
Two decades of following this team is essentially a graduate program in the gap between what a Timberwolves roster says in the summer and what it does in the spring. Confidence has never been the scarce commodity in this market. Arrival has. I have watched better-credentialed versions of this franchise talk exactly this way in a July press conference and be home by the second week of May, and I’ve watched the good ones leave to go win somewhere else.
So the honest accounting: Minnesota went 49-33 and finished sixth in the West in 2025-26. Both teams Ant just called out finished ahead of them and then went further than they did. Neither one got worse this summer. A sixth seed announcing it will handle the top of the conference is, on the raw math, a stretch.
What’s genuinely different this time
The front office earned him some of this. The four-team trade on June 25 brought LaMelo Ball in to run the point and sent Naz Reid to Charlotte and Julius Randle to Brooklyn, which is a real bet rather than a tweak. Then Ant and LaMelo organized the August trip to see Rudy Gobert in France on their own initiative. Ant’s description of the guest list, from the same Manila interview: “I’m taking with me everybody, the whole gang.”
The one line I’d poke at is his answer on sharing a backcourt with Ball: “That’s the best part about me. I will still be the same person.” Somebody in that pairing is going to have to be a slightly different person, at least with the ball. But it’s August, and August is for insisting otherwise.
The receipts arrive early
He won’t wait long to be measured against this. The Wolves are in San Antonio on Oct. 31, ten days into the season. Oklahoma City comes to Target Center on Christmas night, the first home Christmas game this franchise has ever been given. San Antonio returns to Target Center on Feb. 18, the last game before the All-Star break.
Three appointments, all of them on the calendar, all of them against the teams he just named.
That’s not a prediction anymore. That’s a schedule.
Circle all three. He did.
