Every fall the MVP conversation gets handed out like party favors, and Minnesota almost never gets one. Anthony Edwards has spent his whole career being the guy everyone agrees is about to belong on that list without ever quite putting his chair at the table.
Chris Finch would like to change the seating chart. And to his credit, he didn’t do it with a slogan.
Talking to MinnPost’s Britt Robson, Finch laid out the actual price of admission, and it wasn’t more shots. “I also feel that for him to have an MVP season, he has to have more of a defensive component,” Finch said. “That’s the challenge.” He went further: “Ant doesn’t have to take the marquee matchup every night, but I do feel like he has got to re-engage his defensive impact for us.” That is a coach telling his franchise player the ceiling isn’t a scoring number. It’s the half of the floor Ant has been quietly conserving energy on.
Here’s why that framing is smarter than it sounds. Finch is also pulling weight off Edwards’ plate on the other end, calling his on-ball handling duties “probably the most taxing thing for him last year.” LaMelo Ball is in town to run some of the offense so Ant doesn’t have to babysit the ball for 40 minutes. The energy Edwards used to spend surviving double teams and dragging the offense uphill now has somewhere else to go. Finch is handing him a rebate and telling him to spend it on defense. You can hear the same logic in how the Ball-Edwards pairing is being sold this offseason:
https://x.com/RTNBA/status/2085736480220103091
The scoring case was never the problem. Ant put up 28.8 points a night on 48.9 percent shooting and a career-best 39.9 from three last season, with five boards and better than three assists. That is already an MVP stat line in a vacuum. The MVP award has never lived in a vacuum.
So let’s be honest about where he actually stands, because the market is.
The 2026-27 odds have Edwards sixth at +1567. Ahead of him: Victor Wembanyama at +194, then reigning MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Luka Doncic, Nikola Jokic, and Jayson Tatum. It’s the same tier that has boxed Ant out every October of his career, with Wemby now on top after the Spurs bounced Minnesota out of the second round in May. A genuine longshot, a wall of names Wolves fans know too well. Sixth is a waiting room.
Two things move a player out of that waiting room, and neither is a highlight dunk.
The first is the exact thing Finch named. Voters have watched Jokic and Giannis and Shai win partly on the story that they tilt an entire game, both ends, every possession. Ant has the offense. The day he starts turning games with his hands and his close-outs the way he turns them with his first step, the label on him changes. Elite scorer becomes best player alive, and that second phrase is what the trophy actually rewards.
The second is the part nobody can put on a stat sheet, and it’s where this roster gets interesting. Minnesota didn’t replace Mike Conley (gone to Boston) or Julius Randle (shipped to Brooklyn). Rudy Gobert still anchors the back line at 34, and he’s a veteran voice in that room, but the backcourt has no graybeard left to absorb the leadership tax, no steady ball-in-hands presence like the one Conley used to provide. Finch told Robson the time is now: “you have to take ownership over various things in various seasons as you go through your career. I think it is time for him.” An MVP campaign has always been half résumé and half authorship, and for the first time that authorship is unavoidably Ant’s. There’s no veteran playmaker to credit for the poise. If this team holds together in April, everyone will know exactly whose team it was.
Which brings us to the only currency that finishes the job.
Wins. Real ones, at volume. Back-to-back Western Conference Finals in 2024 and 2025 got Ant into the “young star” paragraph but never the top line, and a 49-33 season in 2025-26 that ended in the second round actually cost him ground. Nobody wins MVP off the six seed. The blunt math: this new-look, unnervingly young group probably has to clear the mid-50s and land in the top two or three out West, with Ant driving it and the defensive tape backing the story. Do that, and +1567 looks like a wallet somebody left on the sidewalk. Fall short, and he’s sixth on the board again next fall, still about to belong.
None of that shows up on a highlight reel. It shows up in April, in the standings, in the tape nobody cheers for.
He has the ball less this season. He has the weight more.
That trade is the whole leap.
