Anthony Edwards is sort of a goofball.
He loses track of time in the locker room and shows up late to games and second halves. He plays blackjack incessantly in his free time and takes – and sometimes makes – bank-shot 3-pointers, and not simply because the shot clock is running down.
He is also, perhaps indisputably, the most athletic player in the game (you saw that dunk Monday night, right?) and, since Karl-Anthony Towns went down with an injury that will keep him out for several weeks, the No. 1 one reason why the Minnesota Timberwolves are in the thick of the race for the top seed in the NBA's Western Conference heading into a pivotal Tuesday night tilt against the Denver Nuggets.
But does this all make Edwards a live longshot to stun the likes of Nikola Jokic and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and win the league's MVP award? That might be stretching it – although a path exists.
That path would involve Edwards averaging upwards of 31 points per game – as he's done since Towns went down – and continuing to play consistently elite defense (did you see that game-saving block against the Pacers, the one where Ant hit his head on the rim?) in leading the Wolves to the West's No. 1 seed over Jokic's Nuggets and SGA's Thunder.
“You can never say never,” said David Lieberman, Caesars Sportsbook's lead NBA trader. “The fact that the race in the West is so tight between those three teams makes it a little more likely than it otherwise would be.”
Currently, Edwards' MVP odds range from 100/1 at Caesars to 250/1 at BetRivers, ranking him behind Jokic (-275 at BetMGM and ESPN BET), Gilgeous-Alexander (4/1 at Caesars and BetMGM), Luka Doncic (8/1 at BetRivers), Giannis Antetokounmpo (30/1 at Caesars), and Jayson Tatum (80/1 at BetRivers).
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But if anyone can leapfrog a quintet of peculiarly large humans en route to an unlikely score, it's the Ant-Man.
ANTHONY EDWARDS ELEVATES FOR THE EMPHATIC POSTER ??