MINNEAPOLIS — He is 20 years old. Twenty. The age of a college sophomore.
Strip away everything else that took place — a protester gluing her hand to the court with the game in progress, Karl-Anthony Towns' disappearance in the biggest moment of the season — and focus solely on the images late in the fourth quarter of a game that could have gone either way, understanding that a loss would have carried a death knell undertone, and then realize that a 20-year-old put an NBA organization with a depressing history on his broad shoulders and took it storming into the playoffs.
Anthony Edwards didn't shy away from that tense, pressure-packed moment. The guard's actions screamed Give me the ball, and then he delivered.
His closing flourish in a 109-104 victory over the Los Angeles Clippers on Tuesday at Target Center was nothing if not exhilarating …
Soaring like an Airbus A320 at takeoff for a throwdown dunk that caused a revved-up crowd to nearly blow the roof off Target Center. The stepback 3-pointer with a one-point lead inside three minutes. The look on his face with the ball in his hands, waiting to attack, in the final minute.
"Ant loves the moment," coach Chris Finch said.
"He's a freak when it comes to the game," guard D'Angelo Russell said.
"I told him before the game you're going to be very special in this league," guard Patrick Beverley said.
"When the lights come on," Edwards tweeted, "I show up."
It is the way that he shows up that makes his future look limitless. He plays with an endearing mixture of joy and fearlessness. He doesn't cower when the moment requires someone to take charge. He wants the ball with zero hesitation.
"They were scared to guard me," he said, "and I took advantage of that."
Seriously, who wouldn't want the ball in this guy's hands?
Edwards' performance included a team-high 30 points, five made 3-pointers, five rebounds, clutch free-throw shooting and feisty defense.
He's not always going to succeed in those win-or-lose clutch moments, but even if he fails, he won't be deterred the next time he finds himself in that position. That's a special quality, the hallmark of a superstar.
That Edwards already carries himself in that manner in his second season — at age 20 — makes anything seem possible as the Wolves continue to chart a new direction.
"I can't imagine what he's going to look like when he has that consistency under his belt," Russell said.
Beverley brought a tallboy Bud Light with him to the postgame news conference. Edwards sat beside him at the dais, not old enough legally to imbibe a tallboy himself, but mature enough and uniquely skilled enough to pull the organization along with him in his relentless desire to be great.
"I put in a lot of work," he said, mentioning his regular late-night workouts with his trainer at the team facility. "Sometimes we may go too hard, but there's no such thing."
Nobody should have cheered louder when Edwards jumped onto the scorer's table to celebrate the playoff-clinching victory than Towns, who would have faced a full onslaught of criticism and derision if the outcome had been different. Put simply, in the biggest game of the season, the Wolves played better without Towns than with him.
Towns allowed double teams and physical defense to disrupt him, which inflamed the center's bad habit of complaining to the officials, and he spent the entire game out of sorts.
He scored only 11 points in 24 minutes before fouling out in the fourth quarter. He didn't score a basket until midway through the third quarter.
At some point, Towns needs to realize that constantly griping to the officials is self-defeating, that he becomes so consumed by the wrong things that his antics are counterproductive. It is maddening to watch his supreme talent and skill get overshadowed by a sideshow.
If the lesson didn't resonate with him Tuesday night, it never will.
Towns had to watch the euphoric finish from the bench. Edwards capably filled in the gaps. He looked carefree in doing so, a smile on his face, unrelenting as a competitor.
"This is his moment," Beverley said.
His moment. His stage. At age 20.
