Culture
Anthony Edwards can't run from stardom anymore
PHOENIX — Fresh off, arguably, the most important performance of his young career, Anthony Edwards sat in front of the world with a white tank top and an all-black Atlanta Braves fitted cap that sat loose, hovering just above his crisp hairline — making him look more like an extra in Outkast’s “Player’s Ball” video than the future face of the NBA.
Edwards is who he is. Silly. Lovable. Intelligent. Country. He wears it all, loudly and proudly. He’s also a competitor. A trash-talker. He wears all of those things just as loud, just as proud.
You add all of that up and you have a star. You add all of those things up plus a 40-point performance in a playoff-sweeping 122-116 victory over the Phoenix Suns on Sunday night, and you start to enter superstardom.
Yet, Edwards, for one reason or another, is afraid to go there. For as honest, brash and confident as he is and can be, there lives a bashfulness inside the 22-year-old when it comes to talking about his stature within the sport’s most prestigious club.
A year ago, before a first-round loss to the eventual-champion Denver Nuggets, Edwards said he couldn’t consider himself a young star until he “wins in the playoffs.”
A year later, he did it. Edwards not only won in the playoffs, but he was the alpha in a series that featured the likes of Devin Booker and Kevin Durant, his all-time favorite player. Edwards led his organization to heights it hadn’t seen in 20 years, the second round of the NBA playoffs. He did it with rim-twisting dunks. He did it with a sweet shooting stroke. He did it with gnaw-your-arm-off defense. He did it with leadership. He did it with WWE “Suck It!” extracurriculars. He did it while giving an earful to the player he has looked up to since he was 5.
These are the things that make stars. This is what stardom looks like.
“Nah, not yet, man,” Edwards said Sunday after reaching the benchmark he placed on himself a year ago. “Not yet.”
Edwards, unbeknownst to him, lost the privilege to decide what he is and isn’t in this league.
Kevin Durant congratulates Anthony Edwards after Minnesota swept Phoenix in the first round of the NBA playoffs. (Christian Petersen / Getty Images)
When you score 40 points in a series-clinching victory — on the road at that — you’re a star. When you played 79 regular-season games and were the best player for a team that was one game short of having the top record in your conference, you’re a star. When you’re one of 12 players, at the age of 22, picked to represent your country in the Olympics, you’re a star. When you make everyone laugh every time you’re in front of a microphone, order McDonald’s off Uber Eats immediately after a game, like he did in Detroit last season, you’re a star.
“He’s the face of the league,” said teammate Karl-Anthony Towns, who sat next to Edwards as his reserved side took center stage when talking about his status in the NBA. “He hates when I say it, but it’s true. Like I said, ‘Future so bright, got to put the sunglasses on.’ ”
Regular players don’t decide to dominate when they have a chance to end their opponent for good. They don’t have that ability. Stars shoot 11 of 15 from the floor for 31 points in the second half when their team is trailing at halftime like Edwards did on Sunday. Stars muster up their last bit of energy late in the fourth quarter to throw down a “Night, night!” dunk — like he did with just over two minutes to play when he crossed up Bradley Beal on the wing, took a gather dribble, launched from outside of the paint and forced his childhood hero out of the way as he punished the rim like it hit his sister.
Stars get on their other star teammate amid all the chaos when they do something wrong like Edwards did when Towns committed another unnecessary foul with the game in the balance.
Edwards can’t run from it anymore. No matter how hard he tries. If he doesn’t want to be a star, then stop playing like one.
“He rises to the occasion,” Wolves forward Kyle Anderson told The Athletic.
Stars also make their teammates better. That’s the point of having a star. The gravity of one person makes the existence of others more meaningful.
Edwards picked apart the Suns’ defense as a playmaker. The 40 points will make the headlines, but he also had six assists with only two turnovers in 41 minutes of play. He should have had 10-plus assists, but the Wolves couldn’t buy a bucket in the game’s first 24 minutes.
There were signs throughout the season, but it was this series where Edwards blossomed as a creator for others. There were times early on in his career when it felt like he passed because he had to. There was nowhere else for him to go.
As the season went on, and this playoff series played out, Edwards was welcoming blitzes so that he could create advantages to make the pass to an open man, so that he could get his teammates involved in the flow of the game, so that this Timberwolves team could potentially do something only one team before has accomplished in the franchise’s 35-year history.
But, yeah, Edwards is not a star.
“He is a good person,” said Minnesota assistant coach Micah Nori, who filled in for coach Chris Finch after a collision on the sideline in the fourth quarter left him with a serious leg injury. “And what I mean by that is, they trust him. He’s got some self-humor. You’ve seen all of his interviews. He’s the first one to congratulate and move all of his glory over to his teammates. They all love him.
“When he plays, makes the right play, and they know he cares, not only about himself but the team, he’s done a good job of stepping up in that regard.”
Edwards can keep running from the label all he wants, but if he doesn’t want to embrace it out of fear of being content, then it will never go away. His mindset is correct. His intentions are good. But it’s impossible for anyone with two eyes and a pinch of sense not to see a star when they look at Edwards.
From this point on, there’s no point in even asking Edwards about it. He has spoken — with his play and his personality. He never needs to say it out loud. We’ll all keep saying it for him.
“He’s my favorite player to watch,” Durant said of his star pupil after Sunday’s game. “He’s just grown so much since coming in the league. At 22, his love for the game shines so bright. That’s one of the reasons why I like him the most because he just loves basketball and is grateful to be in this position.
“He’s going to be someone I follow for the rest of his career.”
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(Top photo: Ross D. Franklin / Associated Press)
A famous poet once observed that it is difficult to get the news from poems. The weather is a different story. April showers, summer sunshine and — maybe especially — the chill of winter provide an endless supply of moods and metaphors. Poets like to practice a double meteorology, looking out at the water and up at the sky for evidence of interior conditions of feeling.
The inner and outer forecasts don’t always match up. This short poem by Louise Glück starts out cold and stays that way for most of its 11 lines.
And then it bursts into flame.
“Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” comes from Glück’s debut collection, “Firstborn,” which was published in 1968. She wrote the poems in it between the ages of 18 and 23, but they bear many of the hallmarks of her mature style, including an approach to personal matters — sex, love, illness, family life — that is at once uncompromising and elusive. She doesn’t flinch. She also doesn’t explain.
Here, for example, Glück assembles fragments of experience that imply — but also obscure — a larger narrative. It’s almost as if a short story, or even a novel, had been smashed like a glass Christmas ornament, leaving the reader to infer the sphere from the shards.
We know there was a couple with a flat tire, and that a year later at least one of them still has feelings for the other. It’s hard not to wonder if they’re still together, or where they were going with those Christmas presents.
To some extent, those questions can be addressed with the help of biographical clues. The version of “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” that appeared in The Atlantic in 1967 was dedicated to Charles Hertz, a Columbia University graduate student who was Glück’s first husband. They divorced a few years later. Glück, who died in 2023, was never shy about putting her life into her work.
But the poem we are reading now is not just the record of a passion that has long since cooled. More than 50 years after “Firstborn,” on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, Glück celebrated the “intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine” relations between poets and their readers. Recalling her childhood discovery of William Blake and Emily Dickinson, she declared her lifelong ardor for “poems to which the listener or reader makes an essential contribution, as recipient of a confidence or an outcry, sometimes as co-conspirator.”
That’s the kind of poem she wrote.
“Confidence” can have two meanings, both of which apply to “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson.” Reading it, you are privy to a secret, something meant for your ears only. You are also in the presence of an assertive, self-possessed voice.
Where there is power, there’s also risk. To give voice to desire — to whisper or cry “I want you” — is to issue a challenge and admit vulnerability. It’s a declaration of conquest and a promise of surrender.
What happens next? That’s up to you.
Cold weather can serve as a plot point or emphasize the mood of a scene, and this week’s literary geography quiz highlights the locations of recent novels that work winter conditions right into the story. Even if you aren’t familiar with the book, the questions offer an additional hint about the setting. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
When a writer is praised for having a sense of place, it usually means one specific place — a postage stamp of familiar ground rendered in loving, knowing detail. But Kiran Desai, in her latest novel, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” has a sense of places.
This 670-page book, about the star-crossed lovers of the title and several dozen of their friends, relatives, exes and servants (there’s a chart in the front to help you keep track), does anything but stay put. If “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” were an old-fashioned steamer trunk, it would be papered with shipping labels: from Allahabad (now known as Prayagraj), Goa and Delhi; from Queens, Kansas and Vermont; from Mexico City and, perhaps most delightfully, from Venice.
There, in Marco Polo’s hometown, the titular travelers alight for two chapters, enduring one of several crises in their passionate, complicated, on-again, off-again relationship. One of Venice’s nicknames is La Serenissima — “the most serene” — but in Desai’s hands it’s the opposite: a gloriously hectic backdrop for Sonia and Sunny’s romantic confusion.
Their first impressions fill a nearly page-long paragraph. Here’s how it begins.
Sonia is a (struggling) fiction writer. Sunny is a (struggling) journalist. It’s notable that, of the two of them, it is she who is better able to perceive the immediate reality of things, while he tends to read facts through screens of theory and ideology, finding sociological meaning in everyday occurrences. He isn’t exactly wrong, and Desai is hardly oblivious to the larger narratives that shape the fates of Sunny, Sonia and their families — including the economic and political changes affecting young Indians of their generation.
But “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” is about more than that. It’s a defense of the very idea of more, and thus a rebuke to the austerity that defines so much recent literary fiction. Many of Desai’s peers favor careful, restricted third-person narration, or else a measured, low-affect “I.” The bookstores are full of skinny novels about the emotional and psychological thinness of contemporary life. This book is an antidote: thick, sloppy, fleshy, all over the place.
It also takes exception to the postmodern dogma that we only know reality through representations of it, through pre-existing concepts of the kind to which intellectuals like Sunny are attached. The point of fiction is to assert that the world is true, and to remind us that it is vast, strange and astonishing.
See the full list of the 10 Best Books of 2025 here.
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