Wiggins’ recovery with the Warriors

“Oh my God!” says Warriors coach Steve Kerr from the sideline. Curry, beside him, can only hold his hands to his head and smile. Thirty-two seconds later, just in front of the Warriors’ bench in the right corner, he dodges a defender, steps back and shoots again. The Chase Center crowd is waiting for him. All his teammates on the bench, just inches away, stand beside him, not knowing what to do. When the last three-pointer goes in, the crowd erupts: 16 points in 160 seconds.

Andrew Wiggins finishes with 28 points and the Warriors win by 31. The 26-year-old Wiggins is beaming and looks like he’s having the time of his life.

Eight hours earlier, Wiggins sits in a folding chair deep in the arena and talks about his past, specifically the narrative that defines his NBA career. The narrative, as explained by former teammate Kevin Garnett: “He’s one of my favorite players to watch. And it gives me courage at the same time because he has the ability to be on another level.”

There have always been flashes – games like this one at the San Francisco center – but they’ve been few.

“The question mark with Wiggs has always been consistency,” Garnett says, “not whether he has the ability to be a superstar, but the consistency to be a superstar.”

Garnett wanted more, he says, wanted to “light a fire” under Wiggins. But nothing worked.

“Listen, what I learned about Andrew was that nothing is going to be done to Andrew until Wiggs says it’s going to be done to him,” Garnett says.

Back in the arena, Wiggins smiles when he hears about Garnett, a mentor who, Wiggins says, pushed him on the court, off the court, all the time, and always wanted more.

Garnett echoes a brigade of people throughout Wiggins’ life who say Wiggins and the Warriors, the team Wiggins was traded to from the Minnesota Timberwolves in February 2020, are “a perfect fit.” They say it more loudly now that Wiggins has established himself as a vital player on a championship favorite.

But that’s the problem: Andrew Wiggins was never supposed to be a position player. It’s a damning indictment of both him and those who made him one of the most highly touted players in modern NBA history. The 2014 first-round pick was supposed to be a superstar, an MVP, a cornerstone.

But the Warriors didn’t need that. They needed the kind of player Andrew Wiggins always wanted to be.

In 2009, a highlight video of plays appeared on YouTube, titled: “Nation’s Best 13-Year-Old Players,” featuring the 6-foot-9 Wiggins (who was, in fact, 14 years old at the time). The video, which is still on YouTube and has garnered nearly 5 million views, was the first big glimpse of the hype that fueled the idea of Andrew Wiggins, a future NBA superstar.

The hype accelerated a year later in Hamburg, Germany, when Wiggins, 15, was the youngest player on the court representing Canada at the FIBA U-17 Basketball World Championship. He was 6-foot-6, with a 6-foot-4 wingspan, in his first international event for his native country. In a semifinal game against a U.S. team that featured Bradley Beal and Andre Drummond, Wiggins attacked on the left side, outside the 3-point line. Wiggins penetrated the lane, turned to one side, turned to the other and made the basket.

At the University of Kansas, where he appeared on a Sports Illustrated cover next to a photo of former Jayhawks star Wilt Chamberlain, Wiggins surpassed Danny Manning’s freshman scoring mark, was the conference’s freshman of the year and was named to the all-conference first team and All-America team. Kansas coach Bill Self said Wiggins was the best athlete he had ever coached.

Wiggins recorded an overwhelming 41 points, 8 rebounds, 5 blocks and 4 steals in the Jayhawks’ final regular season game at West Virginia; but he took only six shots – scoring only four points – in the surprising second round NCAA Tournament loss to Stanford, his final collegiate game. Self said Wiggins needed more motivation than he anticipated, that he tried to anger Wiggins but couldn’t. During Wiggins’ only season at Kansas, Self instituted a practice rule that only Wiggins could shoot, because he felt his freshman star defended too often.

“He didn’t want to be different,” says Jay Triano, who coached Wiggins on the Canadian national team. “He wanted to play the sport the right way.” But Wiggins was different.

In the spring of 2014, heading into the 2014 NBA draft, Wiggins visited the P3 Applied Sports Science Lab, a training facility in Santa Barbara, California, that specializes in advanced athlete evaluation. Thousands of professional and Olympic athletes have walked through P3’s doors, including more than 800 NBA players.

But Wiggins quickly stood out. In the vertical jump with both feet, he soared 43 inches. He jumped 41.5 inches with his left foot and 40 inches with his right. To date, P3 has evaluated roughly two-thirds of the players on NBA rosters this season, and Wiggins’ numbers-even at 19 years old-remain cases apart, among the top 10 marks P3 officials have ever evaluated for any athlete.

Then, on June 26, 2014, Wiggins, wearing a black tuxedo jacket, sat with family members at a round table next to the stage at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.

The year before, the Cleveland Cavaliers had selected Anthony Bennett first overall, and the Canadian player almost immediately was declared a historic bust. Wiggins was the new face of the nation.

And so it was that a player whom draft analyst Tom Konchalski said could once be “Canada’s Michael Jordan” was selected first overall in the draft by Cleveland and traded to Minnesota for All-Star forward Kevin Love. The Timberwolves were Wiggins’ franchise. He was 19 years old.

“ANDREW WIGGINS NEVER reached his potential with the Wolves-now he’s gone.”

So read a Minneapolis Star-Tribune headline the day after Wiggins was traded to Golden State in February 2020, ending an inconsistent, basically frustrating six-year stay in Minnesota.

It was the culmination of the prevailing Wiggins narrative: that the expectations that stemmed from his talent never manifested on the court.

Former Timberwolves star point guard Jimmy Butler told ESPN in 2018 that Wiggins was the “most God-gifted” player in the lineup. Former Timberwolves coach Sam Mitchell said he “comes easy” to Wiggins. In 2017, Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor met with Wiggins before offering him a $150 million max contract extension. He needed reassurance: “For me, in making this offer,” Taylor gave to the Associated Press, “I’m speculating that his contribution to the team will be greater in the future.”

Mitchell, meanwhile, elaborates on what he believes has been overlooked, such as the fact that Wiggins played 82 games in three of his first four seasons. Or the fact that he was named Rookie of the Year. Or that he averaged 19.7 points per game with Minnesota. “They have to learn to look at Andrew Wiggins,” Mitchell says, “like they look at all players, and say, OK, this is who he is. This is his specialty. He’s not good at this.’ Then you try to work with that information.”

Tom Thibodeau, who coached Wiggins for three seasons with the Timberwolves, says Wiggins was unselfish and did what was asked of him. “You can score a lot on a team that’s not winning and nobody’s paying attention,” Wiggins says. “And I feel like that’s what I did my first couple of years.”

An NBA scout who evaluated Wiggins prior to the 2014 draft lottery says the expectations placed on Wiggins were never matched with personality:

“We want him to be something bigger. Maybe he’s fine the way he is, and that’s a pretty good 12- to 15-year NBA player.”

“You can’t force him to be the next Jordan, the next Kobe. Maybe he’s just not programmed that way,” the scout says. “There are talents and geniuses-maybe he’s just a talent. He can’t be your number one guy. He can’t be your second guy. He can’t be your third type. Maybe he’s your fourth guy; that’s pretty good.”

And that’s exactly what the Warriors needed.

STEVE KERR LEANS AGAINST a wall not far from the Warriors’ locker room inside the Chase Center and recalls the trade that brought Wiggins to the Bay Area. He had witnessed Wiggins’ famous flashes and says he had long admired the scoring production.

The key to the trade was simple, Kerr says. The team had lost Andre Iguodala, Shaun Livingston, Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson. They were without their entire defensive core of small forwards. “He’s 6-foot-8, and he can score on all the guys we can’t score on anymore,” Kerr says of Wiggins. “So that was the first thing we said to him, ‘Look, this is what we need from you, and you’re totally capable of it.'”