Andrew Wiggins finally lives up to draft hype in pivotal Game 5

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Ten years ago, Andrew Wiggins became the first barnstorming Canadian high-school basketball player.

This country was starting to get used to the idea that it was, all of a sudden, a nation of hoop substance. Toronto’s Anthony Bennett was about to become a surprise No. 1 pick in the NBA draft. (As it turned out, too much of a surprise for everyone, including Bennett.)

But Wiggins was the first kid to get the Bobby Orr treatment. Wherever he went, a crowd assembled to tell each other he was a sure thing.

In early 2013, he rolled through Hamilton to do a little show-and-tell before picking whatever U.S. college would be his pre-NBA pit stop.

Wiggins was 17 years old and terrifically shy. The most exciting part of the afternoon was watching him float three feet above the rim in the layup line before the game. He extended himself for the first five minutes of the contest before powering down. He managed the trick of talking afterward without saying a single thing.

Nonetheless, it was like the Beatles at Shea Stadium in that gym. People were frothing.

Soon thereafter, Wiggins was an indifferent addition to a mediocre Kansas Jayhawks team. All he needed was the pedigree. It had been long since foretold that he would go first overall, and lo, it came to pass.

Although drafted by the Cleveland Cavaliers, Wiggins was shortly traded to Minnesota, where he would be the keystone of a renaissance for the Timberwolves. At worst, he was the new John Havlicek. At best, who knew? He could be Michael Jordan, only more athletic. People actually said things like that.

Like battle plans, sports hype rarely survives first contact with enemy forces. Wiggins wasn’t overmatched in the NBA. But it was readily apparent that he wasn’t special either. He was good enough to start, and that was about it.

No. 1 picks are supposed to change fortunes. With Wiggins in the lineup, the Wolves remained stuck in the bottom half of the NBA pack.

Above average by NBA standards still makes you a one-in-a-million sort of athlete. But if people have been prepped to believe you are a Hall of Famer and you aren’t, they turn on you.

By the time Minnesota began a controlled demolition, Wiggins was a peripheral figure. A guy who’d leveraged his reputation into a max contract extension and not much else.

When he was traded two years ago to the Golden State Warriors, it wasn’t the kind of news that gets pumped on ESPN. It was just another bit of basketball business. Wiggins was 24 years old and already working his way down the other side of the professional mountain.

Shorn of expectation and now on a team that didn’t need him to be great all the time, this is when the real work of establishing himself could begin. On Monday night, Wiggins found his way back to the peak.

One great game cannot make a career, but it can change the story. It just has to be the right game at the right time.

With the series tied at two each, this year’s NBA Finals was balanced on an edge. You had the feeling that Game 5 was in fact Game 7.

Golden State’s opponent, the Boston Celtics, was built the way Minnesota had hoped it would go. The Celtics drafted two protostars – Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown – a few years back. All the Celtics had to do was wait for their bet to pay off.

Great idea, except the modern NBA is built on a foundation of panic. When you do things the right way and they go wrong, the executive playbook tells you to begin tossing bodies overboard. Go buy a veteran star while you still have a shot. Kill your darlings because if they aren’t getting you to the Finals by Year 4, it’s never going to happen.

The Celtics stood on the hand they were dealt, mostly because they could never find the right saviour at the right time.

If Boston had won Game 5, we’d be starting to talk about how that approach had been vindicated. Cut-and-run might be replaced by slow-and-steady as the new NBA strategy of choice.

Then Wiggins showed up.

The top spot on the Warriors roster is reserved for Steph Curry. Golden State doesn’t just lean on Curry. It climbs up on his shoulders and waits for him to piggyback it wherever it’s trying to go.

On Monday, Curry took a breather. For the first time in 233 games – a stretch reaching back three-and-a-half years – Curry didn’t sink a three-point shot. He scored only 16 points.

But the Warriors pulled away in the fourth quarter while strapped to Wiggins’s back. His 26 points led the way on the scoresheet. But it was the muscularity of his performance that put the defence-first Celtics in reverse. Wiggins’s drive through the middle of the Boston half-court with two minutes remaining may turn out to be the emblematic play of these Finals.

“Man, I’m just trying to do every little thing to win. That’s it,” Wiggins said afterward.

It’s a line you often hear from stars – ‘It’s not about me.’ The difference is that, via his body language, you could tell Wiggins meant it. He’s felt what it’s like to be the guy. Not so much fun. Now he’d rather be a guy.

“He’s going to erase memories of his being the No. 1 overall pick, and being in Minnesota, and being relatively pedestrian,” said NBA analyst/megaphone/tastemaker Stephen A. Smith.

That sentence looks weird on the page – ‘erase memories of being the No. 1 pick’ – but it’s exactly right. No. 1 overall is a curse for most players. It’s something they have to work their way out from under. On Monday night, Wiggins finally existed in a draft-agnostic continuum. It didn’t matter where he’d come from or what he should have been. All that mattered was what he was doing right now.

Eight seasons into his career, the Andrew Wiggins people had been waiting to see in that Hamilton gym had arrived.