Naz Reid

Most franchises measure their folk heroes in banners and lottery luck. Minnesota measured one in two words.

Vitals
Born	Aug. 26, 1999, in Asbury Park, New Jersey
Position	Center / Forward
Number	11
College	LSU (one season)
Signed	Undrafted free agent, July 2019

The player nobody drafted. Reid came out of LSU after one season and heard all 60 picks of the 2019 NBA Draft go by without his name. Minnesota took the flyer, signing the undrafted 19-year-old that July — first on a two-way arrangement tied to the G-League Iowa Wolves, then converting him to a standard multi-year deal within two weeks. He was a project with obvious tools and obvious questions: a 6-foot-9 big who could shoot from the perimeter and dribble like a guard, but whose conditioning and defense were an open bet. Nobody in the building could have promised what came next, because nobody in the league had been willing to spend a pick to find out.

The slow build. The rise was not a montage. Reid spent his first seasons shuttling between the end of the rotation and flashes of exactly the modern big the NBA had started to prize: a floor-spacing five who could switch onto smaller players and punish smaller ones back. Year by year the flashes got longer and the trust got deeper, until the bench unit ran through him. By 2023-24 he was the connective piece that let Minnesota stagger its two towers, holding leads while Rudy Gobert rested and giving Karl-Anthony Towns a frontcourt partner who stretched the floor rather than clogging it.

The first Sixth Man in franchise history. On April 24, 2024, Reid was named the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year — the first Timberwolf ever to win the award. He got there the hard way, in one of the tightest votes the honor has produced: 45 first-place votes to Sacramento’s Malik Monk’s 43, a final margin of 352 points to 342. He became only the third undrafted player to win it, joining John Starks and Darrell Armstrong. The season line (a then-career-best 13.5 points and 5.2 rebounds a night) undersold the role. He was the thing every contender needs and few can manufacture: a bench scorer who does not need a play called to matter.

The bet, and the raise. Minnesota kept betting on him, and Reid kept betting back on Minnesota. In June 2023 he signed a three-year deal reported around $42 million with a player option, a bargain in hindsight. Two summers later, he had the option in hand and market interest from elsewhere. He declined it and re-signed to stay: a five-year contract reported around $125 million in June 2025, per Spotrac worth roughly $25 million a year. The undrafted kid had turned himself into a nine-figure decision — and chosen to make it in the one place that gambled on him first.

The end of the arc. He was there for the last of it, too. Reid helped Minnesota back to the conference finals in 2025, and in 2026 he was a productive piece as the Wolves knocked off Denver in the first round before falling to San Antonio in the second. Then the business of the NBA did what it does to beloved role players on contending teams: in the 2026 offseason, Reid became the centerpiece Minnesota sent to Charlotte to acquire LaMelo Ball in a four-team trade finalized in July 2026. The undrafted afterthought had become valuable enough to headline a deal for an All-Star. It was the highest compliment the league can pay, and it still stung.

By the numbers

Regular-season stats with Minnesota, per Basketball-Reference:

Season	GP	PPG	RPG	APG	FG%	3P%
2019-20	30	9.0	4.1	1.2	.412	.330
2020-21	70	11.2	4.6	1.0	.523	.351
2021-22	77	8.3	3.9	0.9	.489	.343
2022-23	68	11.5	4.9	1.1	.537	.346
2023-24	81	13.5	5.2	1.3	.477	.414
2024-25	80	14.2	6.0	2.3	.462	.379
2025-26	77	13.6	6.2	2.2	.456	.362

Wolves career totals

Franchise ranks

• 3rd Made threes (731)
• 5th Blocks (445)
• 6th Games played (483)
• 7th Rebounds (2,460)
• 9th Points (5,745)

Per the all-time franchise leaderboard.

Accolades

• Sixth Man of the Year, 2023-24
• First Timberwolf to win Sixth Man of the Year
• Third undrafted player to win Sixth Man of the Year

Lore

34 at Cleveland. Reid’s peak game came in his Sixth Man season, on March 8, 2024, when he dropped a career-high 34 points at Cleveland, seven of them on made threes, off the bench.

Seven in Game 2. In the spring he took the outburst to the games that count. During Minnesota’s 2024 run to the Western Conference finals he appeared in all 16 playoff games, and in Game 2 against Dallas he buried seven three-pointers (a franchise playoff record for a reserve) on a night the Wolves needed every one.

Two words. Somewhere in the climb, the name stopped being a name. Fans started greeting one another with a flat, knowing “Naz Reid,” the way other places say good morning. It ended up on hand-painted signs, on beach towels, on tattoos. A pizza joint’s marquee read “honk if you love Naz Reid.” He earned a SLAM cover treatment. By the end, he trailed only Anthony Edwards in Minnesota jersey affection. Cult heroes are usually made by one unforgettable game. Reid’s following was made by accumulation, by a state deciding it liked how it felt to say his name out loud. That is a rarer thing, and a more durable one.

What he was. The steal nobody scouted, the big man who let two towers coexist, the first Wolf to win Sixth Man of the Year, and the only one whose name a whole state adopted as a greeting.

He left as the answer to a trivia question that will never stop mattering in Minnesota: who did the Wolves have to give up to get their next star?

What changed (structure and additions only — all existing prose and facts preserved):

• Cold open trimmed to a one-line hook (kept verbatim); the redundant thesis sentences were folded away since every fact in them recurs in the body.
• Narrative section now 5 paragraphs with bolded beats. Moved the career-high game, the Game 2 outburst, the cult-hero passage, and the summary into ## Lore.
• ## By the numbers rebuilt to the house format: linked B-Ref source line → per-season Wolves-tenure table → wp-totals (Games/Points/Rebounds/Assists + Threes and Blocks as signature stats) → wp-ranks → wp-honors.
• ## Lore added with four bolded vignettes; a one-line kicker closes.

Every number is Wolves-tenure only and double-sourced (Basketball-Reference and StatMuse agree on totals: 483 G / 5,745 pts / 2,460 reb / 712 ast / 731 3PM / 445 blk). Franchise ranks come off the B-Ref all-time franchise leaderboard — none is 1st, so no wp-rank-1 class is applied anywhere.

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