ESPN’s Brian Windhorst: What T’Wolves Adding LaMelo Means for Anthony Edwards

The last image the Timberwolves left behind was not a good one. Eight minutes still on the clock, and Anthony Edwards was walking down to the Spurs bench to congratulate them on the series. Brian Windhorst thinks Minnesota saw that too, and decided it could not happen again.

Windhorst laid out the logic for Rich, and it starts with the way that series ended. San Antonio, he noted, was not ready for the last eight minutes of its Knicks games, the stretch where New York went for the kill once it fell behind. Minnesota did the opposite. "Ant brought down the white flag," Windhorst said, and that surrender told the front office something.

The deeper problem traces back to a trade. From the minute the Timberwolves dealt Karl Towns, Edwards has been hunted. "Ant Edwards has been relentlessly double-teamed," Windhorst said, putting the coverage in the same conversation as what Luka Doncic sees. The doubles are heavy, they bother Edwards, and he complains about them. The cruel part, in Windhorst's framing, is that the player who used to draw defenders away from him was watching the whole thing "holding the trophy."

So Minnesota went shopping for a fix. The first call was ambitious. "They tried to go for Giannis," Windhorst said. "They couldn't get him. They looked into some other players, they couldn't get him." The name they could actually land was LaMelo Ball.

Windhorst is honest about the gamble. "LaMelo is a mystery," he said. Almost no playoff history to speak of, and an injury history he called worrisome. But when he pictures Ball next to Edwards, the upside jumps off the page. "My gosh, I see a double-team buster," he said, "and a great guy to put alongside Ant. You double-team Ant now, you do so at your own peril."

The fit is the pitch. The two guards can share the floor, play off the ball, and cover for each other, and Windhorst expects the result to be must-watch. "They're going to be highly entertaining to watch," he said. Minnesota also still has an all-time great defensive center anchoring the back line, which matters when two ball-dominant scorers share possessions.

There is a ripple effect too. Jaden McDaniels, the same player who declared that everybody on the Nuggets was a bad defender before going out and scoring 38, sees his role grow. "That's the fallout of it," Windhorst said. "It increases his role."

None of this makes the path easy. Windhorst was clear that climbing over the Spurs and the Thunder is going to be hard, and adding Ball does not change the size of that mountain. What it changes is the alternative. "Doing nothing would have been a risk," he said, "and they obviously didn't want to be in that boat."

For a team that watched its season end with a white flag, the message from Minnesota is that standing still was the one move it refused to make.