After calling his shot and leading the Minnesota Timberwolves back to the Western Conference Finals in consecutive seasons for the first time in franchise history, Anthony Edwards didn’t cover himself in glory in a Game 1 beatdown against the Oklahoma City Thunder.
The soon-to-be two-time All-NBA player scored 18 points, pulled down nine rebounds, dished out three assists, and committed four turnovers on 5-13 shooting in a lackluster 114-88 Game 1 loss. For the Timberwolves to have any chance of making the franchise’s first-ever NBA Finals appearance, Anthony Edwards has got to get angry, he’s got to get mean, and he’s got to find a way to put his team on his back the way a superstar has to to become the face of the league.
Luckily for Edwards, he doesn’t have to look very far for the perfect blueprint.
Napheesa Collier is the prototype superstar basketball player who threw her team on her back and led the Lynx to the franchise’s first WNBA Finals appearance since the fourth title in 2017. Like Edwards, Collier already had the makings of a great career leading up to the 2024 WNBA Playoffs.
The Lynx drafted Collier sixth overall in 2019 after a stellar career at UConn, and she won Rookie of the Year. She asserted herself as a two-way menace in her first three seasons in the league. After maternity leave in 2022, she returned to punish some more fools in 2023. Collier had established herself as one of the five best players in the WNBA. Still, the Lynx remained mediocre at best after winning four titles between 2011 and 2017 in one of the greatest dynasties in basketball history.
In 2024, Collier entered a realm of basketball dominance not seen around these parts since Maya Moore in the 2010s and Kevin Garnett in 2004. It’s easier to list the things Napheesa Collier didn’t accomplish in 2024 than what she did. Collier won her second gold medal at the Paris Olympics. She was named to the All-WNBA First Team for the second time in her career.
Collier finished second in MVP voting to A’ja Wilson. And she was named the league’s Defensive Player of the Year while averaging career highs in rebounds, assists, blocks, and steals per game. (She also won the inaugural Unrivaled MVP and 1-on-1 contest in 2025.) More important than her accolades, Collier, with the addition of Courtney Williams, led a team that had gone 19-21 in 2023 to a Western Conference-best 30-10 record in the regular season.
The Lynx downed the Phoenix Mercury in straight sets and beat the Connecticut Sun in a five-game thriller to reach the WNBA Finals and face the New York Liberty, the only team with a better record than theirs. Collier’s 19 points, eight rebounds, 2.8 assists, 3.4 steals, and 1.8 blocks in the Finals weren’t quite enough to vanquish the super team built in Brooklyn. Still, Collier had shown that a lone superstar (with plenty of secondary talent around her) can take a team to the precipice of a championship with sheer will and determination.
Ant must learn from Collier’s dominant season last year and find the 15 percent concentrated power of will to force the six-seeded Timberwolves past the 68-win, historically great Oklahoma City Thunder, whose star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander just won his first MVP award after Game 1.
We’ve litigated Ant’s need to make every playoff series about him if the Timberwolves are going to make a run. Now that the run is facing an existential crisis, Ant has to do more than make the series about him; he has to take every play and bend it to his will.
It’s not like he hasn’t done it before. When he made his playoff debut in 2022, a 20-year-old baby Ant almost took down a 56-win Memphis Grizzlies team with just Karl-Anthony Towns by his side. Edwards scored 25.2 points per game to push the Grizzlies to a hard-fought six-game opening round series.
Edwards came out swinging in Game 1 with 36 points and six assists to beat the Grizzlies 130-117, and take a 1-0 series lead. Ant came back down to earth with 20 points and five turnovers in a 28-point Game 2 loss and 19 points in Game 3 to go down 2-1. The Wolves roared back to even the series in Game 4, and Edwards led the Wolves with 30 points in Game 6.
He was eliminated in the first round but showed he was a certified playoff performer.
Edwards returned in 2023 and averaged 31.6 points, five rebounds, 5.2 assists, 1.8 steals, and two blocks in a close five-game series loss to the eventual champion Denver Nuggets. He led the destruction of the Phoenix Suns and Denver Nuggets in last year’s run to the conference finals before running out of gas against the Mavericks. Ant showed flashes of dominance against the Lakers and Warriors in the previous round while letting his teammates take much of the glory, and even said every series isn’t going to be Ant-centric.
This series must be an Ant masterpiece for the Wolves to have any chance. Julius Randle’s 28 points in game one were nice, and he can’t get much less than his supporting cast of Rudy Gobert, Mike Conley, Naz Reid, Donte DiVincenzo, and Nickeil Alexander-Walker gave him in game one. But Edwards will need to channel Napheesa Collier and take the series over himself to get the Timberwolves over the hump and into the Finals.