If you asked another young star what it felt like to go into the defending champs’ building and put up a career playoff-high 43 points in a 106-99 Game 1 win to tip off the second round, he might call it a statement performance.
If he was really feeling himself, he might say Saturday night represented a seismic shift in the balance of power in the Western Conference with the Minnesota Timberwolves stealing home court away from the Denver Nuggets.
However, Anthony Edwards isn’t like any other young star today. He might not be like any other young star in league history.
“It’s not about introducing ourselves to nobody. We know who we are,” Edwards said when asked about Minnesota playing past the first round of the playoffs for the first time in two decades. “We’re coming out and as long as we got each other’s backs, it don’t really matter what anybody else thinks.”
Whatever past woes that Wolves have had in the postseason, the current team is having a moment. It’s now 5-0 in the playoffs, including a sweep of the Phoenix Suns in the first round, with Edwards joining Kobe Bryant as the only other player in NBA postseason history with consecutive 40-point performances at age 22 or younger, according to ESPN Stats & Information research.
Edwards’ 119 points over his past three playoff games are the most by a Wolves player over a three-game span in the team’s postseason history. And he did it Saturday by outplaying the reigning NBA Finals MVP — and a top-three finalist for the regular-season MVP this year — in Nikola Jokic.
“To be honest, he’s a special player, I have huge respect for him, he can do everything on the floor,” Jokic said of Edwards. “You need to give him respect, how good and how talented he is.”
Jokic finished with 32 points, 9 assists, 8 rebounds and 3 steals, but he shot just 11-for-25 from the field (2-for-9 from 3) and coughed up a game-high 7 turnovers. When asked how he could be better against the Wolves’ three-headed front line of Karl-Anthony Towns, Rudy Gobert and Naz Reid in Game 2, Jokic quipped he would need to “have a duplicate clone of myself.”
Minnesota plans to stick around the playoffs for a while to come, as evidenced by the “11” written in big black numerals on the whiteboard in the visitors locker room at Ball Arena after the game. It represents the number of wins the Wolves still need to capture the first championship in team history this spring.
