Anthony Edwards is, in more ways than one, unconcerned with the gravity of things. For two beats longer than what ought to be humanly possible, the Minnesota Timberwolves superstar suspended himself in the air on an 8-foot baseline pull-up late in the fourth quarter of Wednesday’s home game against the Grizzlies. He’d turned the corner on his defender, Ziaire Williams (who has at least 4 inches in height on Edwards), keeping Williams on his hip as he came to a stop and elevated. Edwards propelled himself skyward before Williams, yet it was Williams who faded first, drifting past Edwards’s periphery and into the baseline as Ant hovered above him. Still in midair, leaning back, Edwards adjusted his shot’s trajectory and softened his release. The ball glanced off the backboard’s top-left quadrant before circling the drain down.
It was just the latest in Ant-Man’s collection of ridiculous bank shots this season, a peculiar development in a campaign that has placed him among the greats: Only nine players before this season (all current or future Hall of Famers) have had per-game averages of 25 points, five rebounds, and five assists while shooting at least 38 percent from 3-point range. Edwards has a way about him, a devil-may-care charm that has gilded his career up to this point. Things look different in his hands, no matter what skill is being expressed. That’s how Edwards, who had never attempted more than 30 bank shots in any season prior, inspired a YouTube breakdown titled “Anthony Edwards Has MASTERED the Bank Shot.” The new dog taught himself some old tricks. All the more reason to consider the lineage that he has unwittingly placed himself within.
Quick history lesson: Backboards were introduced to basketball in 1906. Before then, baskets were nailed to mezzanine balconies, which invited projectile interference from spectators not unlike what you’d find in the end zone at a Buffalo Bills home game during a snowstorm. Figuring out angles of contact that would allow the ball to ricochet off the backboard and through the basket became an intrinsic by-product of the game’s new structural addition. It was a lesson in physics identical to the education one receives in billiards: The angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection. It was only natural that the maneuver would share a name: the bank shot. As such, the backboard was commonly known as “the bank” or the “bank board” for much of the 20th century. “On close side shots, it seems to be a little easier to make a goal by using the bank,” Ralph Robert Jones, a pioneering figure in Indiana basketball history (and also, remarkably, a championship-winning NFL head coach of the Chicago Bears), wrote in 1916.
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Hall of Fame guard Sam Jones turned the bank shot into a sort of fractal art form while playing for the Celtics in the ’60s. “Watch hundreds of kids in hundreds of gyms all across the country today. They’re all banking in soft jumpers. That’s the mark Sam Jones left on the game,” the legendary Celtics coach Red Auerbach once wrote, the way Steve Kerr might’ve spoken of Steph Curry in 2015. “It’s his shot they’re shooting, but none of them will ever shoot it any better than he did.”
Julius Erving carried the torch in the ’70s, Larry Bird in the ’80s, Tim Duncan into infinity. But even at the end of the 20th century, now nearly three decades in the rearview, there was a chorus lamenting the slow death of the bank shot. A bastion of fundamental basketball had become passé, an object of ridicule to those who worship at the altar of the perfect swish. Announcers these days almost reflexively recoil at the sight of an unexpected bank shot, making the same staid jokes about calling glass and questioning a player’s intent. A dying art will remain as such when the funeral officiant is the one pissing on the grave.
For what it’s worth, Ant isn’t the only modern star drawn to glass. In fact, the true heir to Duncan in the present day is Luka Doncic, who has banked in shots as often as anyone in the NBA since Duncan’s retirement in 2016. Luka converted 70.3 percent of his 138 bank attempts in 2022-23, which appears to be the upper limit on the accuracy-frequency matrix: Duncan also made 70.3 percent of his bank shots in both 2003-04 (111 attempts) and 2006-07 (165). Doncic may actively work on perfecting his patented miracle floaters, but on a game-to-game basis, the large majority of Doncic’s bank shots are taken near the rim as a perfunctory means of production—the way the basketball gods intended.
But then watch a few of Ant’s attempts. Watch him grin and point to the Minnesota bench after hitting an improbable bank shot—a midrange runner, a set 3-pointer, a K-Pop-a-Shot free throw! Edwards’s newfound fixation on an old-school technique feels like artful subversion at best and suburban boredom at worst. When I think about Edwards’s embrace of glasswork, it does not conjure memories of Duncan and the Brutalist architecture of his legendarily understated game. I don’t think about how Sam Jones would be proud to see his legacy live on—and, frankly, I don’t think Edwards knows who Jones was. To be honest, when I see Ant hit a bank shot, I think about how big, mutated, chunky-soled sneakers have become a calling card for a regal luxury fashion brand like Balenciaga; I think about the year everyone started singing sea shanties on the subway. Explosive popularizations so far removed from their original context that they may as well be ahistoric.
Of course, therein lies the joy and thrill and madness. The bank shot, in all its possible forms, feels revitalized in the hands of Edwards. Never mind Kyrie Irving, DeMar DeRozan, and Dwyane Wade before him—the pull of Edwards’s magnetism is such that these shots feel new. In a way, they are: Those players internalized a sense of physics and geometry in pursuit of a higher offensive plane; there is a sense that Edwards is doing the same, at least in part, just for his own amusement. Basketball’s a game of inches, and there’s the game within the game. Sometimes the game within the game is Anthony Edwards playing H-O-R-S-E with himself:
And sometimes it’s Michael Jordan drilling a free throw with his eyes closed to shut up a yapping Dikembe Mutombo. Sometimes it’s Jordan, in real time, dictating his own plan of attack to a hapless Craig Ehlo, and then executing it to a T, as if he were both the lion in the savanna and David Attenborough. It takes a certain kind of player—with unbridled confidence, gravitas, and raw ability—to create that side pot within the existing structure of a game and not lose the plot completely. Beyond the freakish hang time and the swift and forceful strides, this is where the inescapable comparisons to a young MJ feel rooted in something more than just the viral vernacular of memes.
Though, admittedly, it’s impossible to ignore the visual. The split-face portrait of Edwards stitched to that of a young Jordan began circulating social media at some point in early 2021, during Ant’s rookie season. You know the one. Stare at it cross-eyed for long enough and a coherent profile coalesces—the downward cast of their eyes, the shape of their noses, their natural smiles. Three years later, not a game goes by without someone tweeting the same joke about how convinced they are that Edwards is Jordan’s son. (Should you need further evidence, here is “Anthony Edwards Being Michael Jordan’s Son for 10 Minutes Straight.”)
“I just want them to stop,” Edwards said about the MJ comparisons in a one-on-one interview with Complex back in December. “Because he’s the greatest to ever play basketball and I’m so far from it. Like, not even close. I just wish it stopped. Stop comparing me to Michael Jordan.”
Edwards isn’t the first professional athlete to have his style and likeness reduced to a meme, but given that the meme is literally look at the uncanny similarities between Ant-Man and the greatest player in basketball history, he is without question the biggest beneficiary of the act. “I mean, they not wrong,” he told ESPN with a laugh during All-Star Weekend—his stance seemingly softening as the chorus’s refrain grows louder by the day. The dazzling aesthetics of Edwards’s play have become a sort of chicken-or-the-egg dilemma: Is Edwards’s growth itself fueling comparison, or has the endless allusion to Jordan created a perceptual overlay—a feedback loop that invariably harkens back to the original reference point? Regardless of which came first, it’s now indivisible. At this point, we all recognize the power and influence of a self-referring symbol relayed ad nauseam.
The meme depicts Jordan in his nascent NBA years, still wearing gold chains around his neck, still rocking a full head of hair; when Wolves legend Kevin Garnett made the comparison himself, he made a point to clarify the particular vintage of MJ he sees in Edwards: 1984, the very beginning. “I think he’s right, for sure. ’84 Jordan. He didn’t say ’96, ’97,” Edwards said when asked about Garnett’s assessment. “He said ’84—[a point in his career when] he’s finding himself. I agree with that.”
But what does it mean to be compared to a young Jordan? Is it enough that Edwards looks and moves like him? That he presents as a similar physical and statistical marvel not yet moored to the burden of expectation? Like MJ, Edwards has dealt with a couple of first-round exits to begin his career; unlike Jordan, who played on dreadfully constructed teams in his first few seasons, Edwards is the focal point of a well-insulated Wolves team that, nearly three-fourths of the way through the season, remains at the very top of the West. At just 22, Edwards has found himself on a rare trajectory as he begins to color his skill set within the margins. In year two with Rudy Gobert, Edwards has developed a better sense of the separation created by a Gobert screen, and how to navigate those windows of opportunity—he’s improved his scoring efficiency in the pick-and-roll compared to last year, and his assist rate has increased drastically in his fourth season.
But even among elite individual defenders like Gobert, Jaden McDaniels, and Nickeil Alexander-Walker, on the best team defense in the league, Edwards has flashed moments of rare lockdown intensity that hint at the next stage of his development as a tone-setter on both ends of the floor. In Wednesday’s tightly contested game against the Grizzlies, Edwards begged to match up against Memphis center Jaren Jackson Jr., who had 29 points by the 4:31 mark in the third quarter. Edwards would spend a large portion of the rest of the game holding his ground against Jackson on post-ups, denying him position, and forcing the ball out of his hands. Jackson shot 1-for-6 from the field the rest of the game. “He took the Jackson matchup and shut his water off and turned the game around on both ends in the third when we got down 10 or whatever it was,” Timberwolves coach Chris Finch said of Edwards after Minnesota’s 110-101 win. I mean, that’s not not something Jordan would do.
It’s one thing to flip the switch against the sixth-worst team in the league, another to assert and affirm one’s standing against the elite—something that will have to wait several weeks. Despite boasting the best record in the West, the Wolves have the fifth- or sixth-best odds of making it out of the conference, depending on which sportsbook you consult. The team’s toothless fourth-quarter offense is a concern, specifically in clutch situations. The next level of ascension can happen only in the postseason, when Edwards will have the opportunity to create moments. Moments that can feed into this strange and ecstatic parallel to greatness that the NBA community has bought into, ironically or not. Of course, along with all that comes pressure. Athletic innocence dies at the highest level of competition. At some point, the tongue-in-cheek bank shots and promised left-handed 3s will no longer carry the charm that they used to—I’m sure for some long-aggrieved fans, that time has already come.
This is arguably the most talented team in Wolves history, a history that involves a hell of a lot of early exits tracing back to the Garnett era. Gobert has to contend with his demons; neither Ant nor Karl-Anthony Towns has made it past the first round. The fan base hasn’t seen the team advance in the playoffs in two decades. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. But the beauty and stupidity of youth is that none of that matters. Edwards was born a month before Jordan announced his ill-fated comeback with the Washington Wizards. Like the rest of his generation, he understands Jordan’s greatness mostly as a general truism and registers the significance of Jordan through the many symbols His Airness has embodied as a meme. Jordan went through hell trying to make his first Finals run, as did so many greats before and after him. But Ant would be the first to tell you that he isn’t Jordan. The Wolves have more than 20 years worth of disappointments to rectify. Good thing Edwards possesses the kind of talent, self-belief, and—perhaps most importantly—levity of mind that renders history irrelevant.
