Behind the late-night chats that have shaped Anthony Edwards’ postseason success

Chris Hines, the Timberwolves assistant who has been Anthony Edwards’ player development coach the past four seasons, joked Friday that “basketball is ruining my life.”

“I got a few problems. I’m working it out. I talked to my therapist about it,” Hines said with a laugh. “… I love the game. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

This is confirmed by Edwards, who said Hines is a “psycho” when it comes to sending him video clips.

“He breaks stuff down like to ways that I’ve never seen before,” Edwards said.

The thing is, basketball is on the brain of Hines and Edwards at all hours of the day — and night. Even at 2 or 3 a.m., Hines will be awake breaking down film, and he will text Edwards in the middle of the night.

“If I shoot him something I’ll be like I hope he’s not awake, check this out in the morning,” Hines said. “But it’s, ‘I’m awake.’ OK, cool, let’s talk about it now then.”

He added: “We really don’t get a lot of sleep after games. Our brains are still going, competitive juices are still going. If we see something, then we’ll talk about it right then and there instead of waiting until tomorrow. We’ll just bounce ideas off each other.”

These late-night film sessions with Hines are a small part of how Edwards has navigated this postseason, a playoff run that has been different from others. In previous seasons, Edwards’ playoff brilliance was marked by eye-popping scoring performances. Now, his approach has been more patient, more cerebral when it comes to dissecting how teams have defended him. He is more of a playmaker, willing to use the attention he draws to get teammates open looks, as evidenced by his 12 assists in Wednesday’s Game 5 victory over Golden State, the most he’s had in a playoff game.

He isn’t forcing shots to fill the boxscore, not even when the temptation is there. As a result, the Wolves are back in the Western Conference finals after beating the Lakers and Warriors in five games each. No matter what those teams threw at him, Edwards adjusted and found ways to beat them.

“He’s playing the long game when it comes to these series,” Wolves coach Chris Finch said. “Because as much as he wants to put his mark on it, he’s realized he’s gonna put his mark on it over the course of the series, rather than just every single game all the time. He has great patience, and he’s forcing teams to alter what they do as the series goes on.”

Hines said these late-night film sessions don’t always include clips of the Wolves and their opponents. When the Wolves played the Lakers, he and Edwards watched each game of the Bulls-Lakers NBA Finals from 1991, Michael Jordan’s first championship.

“How did certain series play out? That’s our next stage,” Hines said. “This series played out this way because of what? Is there any similar areas to that series and what you’re going through? I’m a big believer in history repeats itself.”

They didn’t pick a series to watch when they played the Warriors, but Hines said he will choose one based on whether the Wolves face the Thunder or Nuggets beginning with Game 1 on Tuesday.

After the Wolves lost and Edwards struggled in Game 2 against the Lakers, Edwards mentioned he and Hines had one of those 4 a.m. film sessions. That helped him bounce back in Game 3, when he led the Wolves to a 116-104 victory, with Edwards making all the right reads in clutch time. They figured how to deal with the Lakers “leaving the lag man” in the driving gaps for Edwards after someone cut through the defense. This made the Lakers defense seem like a zone to Edwards when it wasn’t quite that.

“They did a little bit of different stuff,” Hines said.

But Edwards finished with 29 points and eight assists, and the Wolves closed the game on a 13-1 run. Then in Game 5, the Lakers just began blitzing Edwards, and that resulted in a big night for Rudy Gobert, who had 27 points and 24 rebounds.

“Being able to listen and be willing to learn. That’s the biggest thing for me because most guys don’t want to listen or they think they know it all already,” Edwards said. “Having somebody like that in my corner is big for me, man, because he gets on me when I’m messing up and he never gives me too much credit, so I appreciate him.”

Hines said he tries not to let his mood change depending on whether Edwards has a good or bad game, because Edwards is already hard on himself when he doesn’t play well. Those are the times when he might not always get a late-night text back from Edwards, and it might come in the morning instead. But Edwards has said one of the keys in his development is learning to break down film even when he may not want to.

“The thing about watching film is you got to be willing to accept the bad,” Edwards said. “I think most people, they only want to watch it when it’s good. … Like, what could I have done better? And I think that’s the perspective that helped me change as far as my playmaking and seeing the floor.”

When Finch has one-on-one conversations with Edwards, they tend to be during normal business hours. Throughout the course of the season, you can catch Finch and Edwards chatting off to the side at the end of a shootaround or practice.

“Sometimes there’ll be something on my mind I want to tell him. Sometimes it’s just a check-in because we haven’t necessarily chatted for a bit in that regard,” Finch said. “And I’m very conscious of giving our players space. There’s so many people that are drawing on them. I’m talking about just in our own environment, could be other coaches, front office, training room, community. So I try to pick my moments and be purposeful [with Edwards].”

Finch drew some attention for saying Edwards needed to be more of a tone-setter after Game 1 against the Warriors, but that moment doesn’t reflect Finch’s satisfaction with Edwards’ overall performance this postseason.

“We’ve played 10 games, and he’s maybe had two subpar games. That’s great,” Finch said.

The Warriors employed a similar tactic to the Lakers’ Game 5 approach — they blitzed Edwards and dared him to give up the ball, especially to Gobert. Earlier in his career, Edwards might have craved the moment. He might have wanted to shoot the Wolves into the next round in a clinching game. But the more measured approach in both series paid off, with Finch crediting Hines and assistant Pablo Prigioni for preparing Edwards to face “micro-situations” that pop up in each game.

“Sometimes it’s subtle, sometimes it’s drastic,” Finch said of the adjustments teams make on Edwards. “The other day, they were a little bit more aggressive on him, and he has 12 assists. That’s what you want, because now they’re taking the bet that he’s not going to make these plays.”

But this is where Edwards is in his evolution as a player. He will make the right plays, even after he said in January he was frustrated with all the double-teams he was facing. That moment seems distant. Over five seasons, he has learned how to deal with them, one late-night texting film session at a time.

“This is a regular thing, 82 games,” Hines said. “We text, and I leave him alone in the summertime a bit, and then I’m back on him.”