How football and Instagram built Anthony Edwards, the NBA’s next superstar

You start with a football prodigy. You stir in some Instagram highlights. You send him to rescue a historically cursed franchise. And then you’re staring at the Minnesota Timberwolves’ Anthony Edwards.

Edwards—a 22-year-old Atlanta native with broad shoulders and rocket-boosted sneakers—has emerged as this season’s breakout star. He led the Timberwolves to their most wins since the 2003-04 season. Two decades after their only playoff series victory, Minnesota now leads the Phoenix Suns two games to none, and has fans envisioning an NBA Finals run.

“Get him the ball,” is how Minnesota coach Chris Finch described his strategy after Edwards poured in 33 points in the Wolves’ series-opening win. “It’s fun to watch, for sure.”

Edwards has seemed bound for greatness in the NBA ever since Minnesota selected him with the first overall pick in the 2020 draft, and his statistics have ticked upward in each of his four pro seasons. What got him to the draft, however, was less predictable. Where many of today’s superstars focused on basketball from their earliest days, Edwards started his athletic life with a football in one hand and a smartphone in another.

When he was just a grade-schooler, Edwards was already something of a celebrity in the football-crazed Atlanta area. “People who didn’t even have kids used to come to his games to watch him play,” his brother, Antoine Edwards, said. As a more-than-pint-sized running back, Anthony looked the part of a future star in the Southeastern Conference, spinning past defenders or simply getting them in his sights and battering through them.

“He would just run people over,” Antoine said, laughing. “He was a man among boys, basically.”

Anthony came to basketball later, but it quickly became clear that his abilities transferred between sports. He had the muscle and quickness to get by almost any defender, and an astonishing vertical leap that he couldn’t put to much use on the gridiron. After an accident at a football practice briefly injured his leg, Edwards saw that one sport held a safer and more lucrative future than the other.

With his attention on basketball full-time, Edwards soon became one of the most sought-after high-school basketball recruits in the country—even if he didn’t have much patience for actually watching entire basketball games.

“I wanted him to sit down and watch a full game,” said Tysor Anderson, Edwards’s coach at Holy Spirit Preparatory School. “He was like, ‘No, I’ll just look at the highlights on Instagram.’”

Anderson couldn’t argue with the results. He realized that Edwards could flip through his feed, see a sequence from Kyrie Irving or Kevin Durant—now the Wolves’ opponent with the Suns—and replicate it in his own game.

“He would work on it obsessively,” Anderson said. “Within a week, he was bringing it out in a game scenario.”

Edwards is uniquely suited to mimicking stars of all sorts. After his lone season at the University of Georgia, Edwards did a workout with P3 Labs, a sports science company that gathers biomechanical data. Most NBA draft prospects are near the top of the charts in quick, evasive maneuvers or brawny, straight-line ones. Edwards, though, was off the charts in both.

“It’s very rare for somebody to check all those boxes,” said P3’s Eric Leidersdorf. “He can put his hard hat on if he wants to, or he can grab a scalpel if he needs it.”

NBA fans watching Edwards now can see glimpses of superstars past. The spinning, fadeaway jump shots he’s used to punish Phoenix in this series are reminiscent of Kobe Bryant’s. The old-school bank shots that he’s pinged off the backboard? Edwards has cited San Antonio Spurs legend Tim Duncan.

Certain maneuvers, though, are all Edwards’s own, and shot through with a bit of that old gridiron grit. Earlier this season, he flew over a defender and dunked so hard that he dislocated a finger in the process.

“I can take bumps, I like the contact,” Edwards said. “I embrace it.”

If Minnesota’s success against Phoenix is a rare treat for a downtrodden franchise, it is also a full-circle moment for the Timberwolves’ superstar. At one point in the Game 1 victory, Edwards rose up for a 3-pointer over Durant and talked trash to the player whose shots he’d spent much of his childhood copying.

“That’s my favorite player of all time,” Edwards said after the game. “So that was probably one of the best feelings ever, in my whole life.”

- The Wall Street Journal