Anthony Edwards
The face of the franchise's second golden age. No. 1 pick in 2020, back-to-back Western Conference Finals in 2024 and 2025, an Olympic gold medal, and the most magnetic personality the Wolves have ever employed.
For the first time since a certain No. 21 left for Boston, the Timberwolves employ a player the rest of the league is jealous of.
| Vitals | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 5, 2001, Atlanta, Georgia |
| High school | Holy Spirit Preparatory School (Atlanta) |
| College | Georgia (one season) |
| Drafted | No. 1 overall, 2020 |
| Seasons as a Wolf | 6 (2020–present) |
| Number | 5 |
The arrival. Minnesota took Anthony Edwards first overall in the 2020 draft into the strangest possible circumstances: a pandemic-delayed season, empty arenas, and a franchise in one of its periodic identity crises. What emerged almost immediately was the thing that can’t be coached: a fearless, joyful, fully-formed personality attached to one of the most explosive athletic profiles the sport has ever seen. The dunks arrived first. The winning took a little longer.
The ascent. By year three, Edwards was an All-Star. By year four, he was the best player on a team that ended two decades of franchise misery at once: the 2023-24 Wolves won 56 games, and Ant dragged Minnesota past the defending-champion Nuggets in a Game 7 comeback in Denver that instantly entered franchise lore, delivering the first Western Conference Finals trip since 2004. A year later he did it again, reaching a second straight conference finals before falling to Oklahoma City, all while leading the entire NBA in made threes. That stat would have been a joke about his shot selection two years earlier; instead it became proof of the most important skill leap of his career.
The burden. The 2025-26 season was the complicated one: a career-best 28.8 points per game across an injury-shortened 61 appearances, a fifth straight playoff trip, 49 wins, and a locker room that never quite cohered, which the front office answered by trading half the core for LaMelo Ball. Whatever happens next, the experiment is built entirely on Edwards’ shoulders: he is the tone-setter, the crunch-time answer, and the adult in a backcourt that now features two of the boldest shot-takers alive.
By the numbers
Regular-season stats, per Basketball-Reference:
| Season | GP | PPG | RPG | APG | FG% | 3P% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-21 | 72 | 19.3 | 4.7 | 2.9 | .417 | .329 |
| 2021-22 | 72 | 21.3 | 4.8 | 3.8 | .441 | .357 |
| 2022-23 | 79 | 24.6 | 5.8 | 4.4 | .459 | .369 |
| 2023-24 | 79 | 25.9 | 5.4 | 5.1 | .461 | .357 |
| 2024-25 | 79 | 27.6 | 5.7 | 4.5 | .447 | .395 |
| 2025-26 | 61 | 28.8 | 5.0 | 3.7 | .489 | .399 |
Wolves career totals
Franchise ranks
- 1st Made threes (1,314)
- 1st Points per game (24.6)
- 3rd Points (behind KG and KAT)
- 3rd Steals
- 4th Assists
Per the all-time franchise leaderboard.
Accolades
- 2026 All-Star Game MVP
- Olympic Gold, Paris 2024
- 4× All-Star (2023–26)
- 2× All-NBA (2024, 2025)
- Led NBA in threes, 2024-25
- All-Rookie 2nd Team, 2021
Lore
36 at 20. His playoff debut, Game 1 at Memphis in 2022: 36 points at age 20, announcing that stage fright was never going to be part of the profile. The Wolves lost the series; nobody who watched it doubted where the franchise was headed.
The dunk. The 2024 poster on Utah’s John Collins: arguably the most violent in-game dunk of the decade, replayed until the file degraded. There is a generation of Wolves fans whose entire relationship with this team began as that clip crossed their feed.
Game 7 in Denver. Down 20 to the defending champs, on the road, season on the line — and the Wolves outscored Denver by 25 the rest of the way. It gets its own Wolvespedia entry eventually; it’s the best playoff win in franchise history and it isn’t particularly close.
The quote machine. Ant’s review of the Eiffel Tower, “That Walt Disney Rudy”, is just the latest entry in the canon. He has also spent a meaningful fraction of his career earnings on league fines for saying exactly what he thinks about officiating, and swears with total sincerity that he could have played in the NFL. The scariest part is nobody’s sure he’s wrong.
The ledger, so far. Five straight playoff appearances. Back-to-back conference finals in 2024 and 2025. The franchise’s first true heir to Garnett’s throne — not as a player, the games are nothing alike, but as the reason the rest of the country watches Timberwolves basketball. The story is maybe a third of the way told.
He said he’d make this franchise matter. It does.