Just one day after Team USA lost the bronze medal game to Canada in the 2023 FIBA World Cup, reports began circulating about which stars would join forces for the 2024 Olympics. LeBron James was interested, and he soon placed a phone call to discuss it with Steph Curry. Grant Hill, the team’s managing director, set to work recruiting Joel Embiid, who holds both French and American citizenship. To bounce back for the Paris Games, it seemed, Team USA would go all in on star power.
In addition to James, Curry, and Embiid, the men’s Olympic roster includes Kevin Durant, the all-time leading scorer for Team USA. It features Jayson Tatum, Jrue Holiday, and Derrick White, fresh off an NBA title with the Celtics. Perennial All-Defense candidates Anthony Davis and Bam Adebayo round out the front line, while Devin Booker, Anthony Edwards, and Tyrese Haliburton offer depth in the backcourt. All told, this team has four different NBA MVPs. Combined, it has 11 Olympic medals, 78 NBA All-Star appearances, and 15 NBA titles.
Every Olympic roster tells a story, and this one captures the past 15 years of American basketball. The next generation is on its way, and many of the NBA’s biggest stars play for other countries. Still, with Steph, Bron, and KD (health permitting) playing together for the first time, the Games in Paris offer a chance to bring a storybook ending to one of the defining eras of NBA history. Most of the basketball-viewing public seems content to sit back and watch those three take an international victory lap. Not Edwards, though.
“I’m still the no. 1 option,” Edwards told reporters earlier this month in Las Vegas. “Y’all might look at it differently; I don’t look at it differently. Hey, I just go out there and be myself, shoot my shots, play defense. They got to fit in to play around me.”
Edwards is poised to take the baton from this generation, and he knows it. That’s not to say he doesn’t look up to his elder teammates. Edwards attended Curry’s summer camp as a kid; growing up, he idolized Durant; and he has said it’s a “dream come true” to play with LeBron on Team USA. He’s learning everything he can from the stars that surround him, and he’s just as amazed by LeBron as anyone.
But Edwards glides through Team USA events with an audacity akin to a young Kobe Bryant’s, with plans to make all of this his one day.
That gumption has been on full display since the team gathered in Las Vegas earlier this month. After the very first practice, Edwards spotted Davis talking in front of the assembled press. Surmising that Davis’s time in the chair was up, Edwards made his presence known. “Let me get in there, nephew!” boomed Edwards, in a Southern drawl that teetered between half joking and dead serious. After a bit of banter, Davis relented, handing over the spotlight to the 22-year-old, and perhaps offering a preview of what’s to come.
“There’s definitely a sense that he’s one of the guys waiting to take over the league once LeBron and Steph and Kevin kind of move on,” Team USA coach Steve Kerr tells me. “I think there’s definitely an awareness that he’s part of that next group, but he’s ready for that to happen now.”
This attitude is nothing new to anyone who has followed Edwards over the past decade. From when he was an unknown prospect from Oakland City, Atlanta, to when he was the kid who became a legend in the recreation centers of College Park, Georgia, to when he eventually found a home along the shores of Lake Minnetonka, Edwards has spoken his feats into existence. He possesses unbridled confidence and the work ethic to make good on his guarantees.
That quality has built Edwards into a multi-time All-Star and one of the most prominent young faces in the NBA. It’s enabled him to turn the Minnesota Timberwolves into a Western Conference power and earn a spot on maybe the most decorated USA roster since the Dream Team, giving him a chance to prove to the world what he already believes about himself.
“Everywhere I go, I don’t feel like nobody better than me,” he tells me in Vegas. “I don’t care who I’m on the floor with. ... I feel like I’m the best guy out there at all times.”
But as Team USA makes the trek to Paris, Edwards will have to find the balance between achieving his individual goals and finding a role alongside the greats of the generation he grew up idolizing.
The person in charge of managing Edwards’s place on Team USA is Kerr, whose relationship with Edwards dates all the way back to before Edwards was drafted and started on rocky footing.
During the summer of 2020, Edwards was slogging through the predraft process, which had been extended to accommodate the NBA bubble playoffs during the COVID-19 pandemic. “We were working so hard, and they kept pushing the draft back,” says Justin Holland, Edwards’s former trainer and now business manager. “At one point, I just think we were all getting tired of each other. So one minute, we just said, ‘Let’s just take a week off and just disconnect and then get back to it.’ … The intensity level wasn’t quite the same.”
That was when the Warriors called. Edwards agreed to a workout, summoning Golden State brass to the Tracey Wyatt Recreation Center, just outside Atlanta. At the time, Kerr had his doubts about the guard from Georgia, who put up big scoring numbers that didn’t always translate to team success. “The first impression was it was hard to tell whether he was going to be good or not because he was just so raw,” Kerr tells me. “He was so young, and he was full of energy, which we loved, but we just worried about: Was he going to be a worker? Because he didn’t know anything.”
The workout did little to sway Kerr’s opinion. Kerr stopped the session after an hour and tore into the guard. “He was like, ‘Imagine everybody walking through the door has $50 million,’” Holland recalls Kerr saying. “‘Because the way you’re working out, you’re not the type of guy to give $50 million to.’”
At dinner later that evening, Edwards peppered Kerr, general manager Bob Myers, and co–executive chairman Joe Lacob with questions about Golden State’s glory days. Kerr relayed the visual of how most of the practices during the Warriors’ reign atop the basketball world ended and the effort required to sustain the career Edwards claimed to covet.
“What I shared was just how hard Kevin and Steph and Klay all worked,” Kerr says. “And I told him that my favorite part of practice was after we finished, when all three guys went to their own basket and had their individual workout and how they all went game speed and how incredible it is to see that on a daily basis. But that that’s what it takes to be great.”
Following the workout gaffe, Edwards made a point not to let anything like it happen again. “It was like one of those ‘I told you so’ moments,” Holland says. Edwards jumped back into the work, which only ramped up after he became the no. 1 pick in the 2020 draft and moved to Minneapolis. Holland eventually transitioned into Edwards’s business affairs, while Chris Hines, an assistant for the Wolves, took charge of Edwards’s workouts. Quickly, Hines became aware of Edwards’s insomniac tendencies.
“He’ll hit you up,” Hines tells me. “‘Hey. Hey, you up? Let’s get busy. Let’s go to the gym.’ You’re like, ‘Hey, bro. I wasn’t up, but why you up?’”
By Edwards’s second training camp in the fall of 2021, the Wolves’ assistant coaches had to beat Edwards to the gym, with the sleep crust still in their eyes. “Me and Joe Boylan was in there every day in training camp at around 4:30 a.m. for two weeks,” Hines says. “Because the dude couldn’t sleep, and me and Joe looked at each other. We’re like, ‘We got to stop it.’ I was like, ‘Not yet. Not yet. This is how we gain his trust.’”
With Edwards on board with the program, a proper plan was put into place. During the summer months, Edwards arrived at the facility at 9 a.m. for an hour of weight training. Then he hit the court for a two-hour workout, ate lunch, and returned to the hardwood for a 90-minute shooting circuit to end the day. Off the court, Hines showed Edwards film of the stars of Edwards’s youth. Edwards dissected how Kobe Bryant used deception to keep defenders on their heels. “I showed him, ‘See? You see that? You see his back foot? Did you see his front foot? Did you see where his angle was? You see how you can get it off?’ And he started studying it more than I started studying it.”
They analyzed how Tracy McGrady used change of pace to keep his defenders on edge and how Durant perfected his midrange. But Hines hit a snag when he attempted to show Edwards one of his contemporaries’ moves, prompting a visceral reaction from the young protégé.
“I was like, ‘Look. If you get this in your game, dude, you’re going to be a star,’” Hines recalls, careful not to reveal the player’s identity. “He said, ‘Man, I will dog him. Don’t ever show me him. I don’t care.’ I was like, “What? Man, it’s not about the player. It’s about the actual move.’”
Soon enough, Edwards relented. “He’s starting to learn that other players still have game, too,” Hines says.
Edwards has since worked his way to being one of the league’s premier two-way superstars. He finished second in Rookie of the Year voting in 2020-21, capping a campaign in which he averaged 19.3 points, 4.7 rebounds, three assists, and one courtside apology to Kerr for his lackluster workout. During the 2021-22 season, he led the Timberwolves to the franchise’s first postseason berth in five years, cementing himself as a source of hope for the long-middling franchise.
Last summer, Edwards reunited with Kerr for the 2023 World Cup in Manila, which doubled as Edwards’s international coming-out party. Against Lithuania, he scored 35 points, just three shy of Durant’s World Cup record. By the end of the tournament, he’d led the Americans in points and rebounds, staking an undeniable claim as the best player on a team that also featured Jalen Brunson, Mikal Bridges, and Haliburton. Despite Team USA’s failure to medal in international competition for just the second time in 21 years, Edwards says the experience, and playing under Kerr, set the stage for his breakout 2023-24 season.
“Last year, he was great for me,” Edwards tells me of Kerr. “Taught me a lot of new sets, was trying to get me to learn how to play without the ball, and just making reads. The whole coaching staff, though, not just Steve. Ty Lue, Erik Spoelstra, they all trying to get me to find a teammate so I get better shots off myself.”
The lessons carried over stateside, where Edwards made a massive leap in his fourth pro season, averaging a career-high 25.9 points, 5.1 assists, and 5.4 rebounds and helping push the Timberwolves to 56 wins and the third seed in the West.
Two nights before the playoffs commenced, Hines found himself in a gym with Edwards, nervous about the Wolves’ upcoming series against the Suns. Phoenix had swept the season series against Minnesota, giving observers reason to believe the Suns’ perimeter attack could upset the Timberwolves. Edwards caught wind of Hines’s growing anxiety and delivered a prophetic message.
“Have no fear,” Hines recalls Edwards saying. “Ant-Man is here.”
Edwards demoralized the Suns in four games and then led the Timberwolves in a historic seven-game upset over the defending champion Nuggets. But the Wolves’ magical run would end in the conference finals, after the Mavericks dismissed them in five games. A few hours after the final contest, Hines found his pupil to make preparations for Team USA and convince Edwards to take a few weeks off before camp commenced.
“‘Get your body right, get your mind right. I’ll hit you in a minute.’
“But he looked me in my eyes as soon as I shook his hand, and he said, ‘Man, I’ll see you soon, Jack.’”
With the world stage waiting, there was work to be done.
Edwards’s basketball life has been defined by the art of learning on the fly. And during the first few weeks of Olympic tune-up, Edwards is still figuring out how to fit alongside this star-studded group. In Minnesota, he’s expected to take on an alpha role to push the Timberwolves toward greatness. But this team requires something different.
Edwards has come off the bench in four of the U.S.’s five exhibition games, though he was in Kerr’s closing lineup in Monday’s narrow win over Germany. He’s scored double figures in all five contests. His size and strength in the backcourt have looked transformative for Team USA, but there are times when Edwards has struggled to fit into the team concept. In the first exhibition game against Canada, following a thunderous ovation from the Vegas crowd when he was subbed in, Edwards turned it over while attempting a simple entry pass to Davis. A week later in another exhibition against Australia, Edwards scored 11 of his team’s first 19 points as the Americans built a double-digit lead … but then scored only three points the rest of the way, as Team USA eked out a six-point win. For every highlight play, there’s a possession in which Edwards unnecessarily dribbles into a double team while his superstar teammates patiently wait for a kick-out.
Fortunately, Kerr has some experience presiding over generational talent. As an executive, he ran the Suns during the Seven Seconds or Less era, and he’s steered the Warriors to the top of the NBA mountaintop (multiple times). He’s excited for the full-circle opportunity to coach Edwards again this summer, at this stage in the young superstar’s career.
“I think he has proven he belongs with all these guys,” Kerr tells me. “I think last year he thought he was as good as everybody, but he hadn’t really proven it yet. I think over the last year he has proven to everybody in basketball that he is one of the very best players in the league.”
And for all his brash declarations, Edwards has seamlessly fit with this iteration of Team USA. In camp, he’s become a chameleon, supplying trash talk, acrobatic highlights, and levity. “He brings a lot of comedy,” Holiday tells me. “How he plays, you can tell he plays with all the joy, and that energy definitely seeps into everybody else.”
“I just come in and be myself,” Edwards says. “And I think I’m a likable person, so everybody seemed to gravitate towards me. And I’m funny, they laugh at me, so I think it’s pretty simple.”
But in between the boisterous banter, Edwards has become a quick study, consistently at the hip of greatness.
Following practices, he’ll venture to the basket occupied by LeBron, trading free throws and jokes as James sprinkles in pockets of advice, similar to the role Kobe Bryant served during James’s early years. “I’m just soaking everything up,” Edwards says. Before Team USA’s friendly against Canada, Edwards made a point to time his pregame workout with James’s, copying the King’s every move while James occasionally blurted out instructions.
“One thing about Ant,” says Davis, “he’s around so much talent. He’s looking at us like, ‘OK, how can I get better? How can I learn from these guys?’”
Edwards’s maturation was evident during Team USA’s training camp in Southern Nevada. During the first practice session, he greeted a corner 3-pointer from Booker with a customary “Hell yeah, Book!” In a sport where outsize egos can undermine team concepts, Edwards’s balance of confidence and humility has been welcomed by his all-world veterans.
“It’s been cool to play with him just because he knows he’s good,” Curry tells me. “And still, ... he’s a walking prove-yourself type of dude every day, and it’s been cool to have that energy around. We can help guide him, obviously. Even, I saw the [no. 1 option] quote. I was like, ‘I love that.’
“He thinks he’s the best player on the team, and when he’s out there, he makes plays. He’s a confident dude, and we need that type of energy, youthful energy, to get us going.”
Not even Kerr is ruling out Edwards’s claim to be the no. 1 option.
“The point of it is that you’re not going to convince him otherwise,” Kerr tells me. “And there’s no point in trying to do so because if he emerges as the no. 1 option, if it actually happens, that’s a good thing.”
Then Kerr offers a caveat.
“But it has to happen organically,” he says. “I can’t sit here and determine who is the no. 1 option. The team has to take shape on its own, and roles kind of form, and guys play and they emerge. So I think he has every belief that he will be the no. 1 option on this team. I don’t doubt it; I don’t doubt that he believes it.”
And after an impressive showing thus far, his legendary peers have high expectations for the young star. “Stay healthy, and the sky’s the limit,” Curry says. “He’s not even 23 yet. So stay healthy and work. Those two things happen, he’ll be fine.”
But even with the cosigns, Edwards will continue to chart his own path and strive toward the bar he sets for himself. Four years ago, as Edwards was figuring his way through the league, Hines came to him with a question: “You want to be a guy who makes a lot of money in this league? You want to be an All-Star? What is your true goal?”
“I’m trying to be the best player to ever do it,” Edwards responded.
