IN HIS ROLE as the executive director of USA Basketball, it's not often Grant Hill has a hard time contacting players he's considering for the team. Even in non-Olympic years, that's a call virtually every NBA superstar will take or return quickly.

But, in his attempts to assemble the 2023 FIBA World Cup squad, there was one star Hill couldn't reach.

"I couldn't get ahold of Ant," Hill told ESPN of the then-21-year-old who has taken the league by storm. "I talked to [Minnesota Timberwolves president] Tim Connelly. I talked to all these people around him. But I just kind of got the vibes that he was on the fence about it and didn't really know why."

Anthony Edwards was young and had little experience with the FIBA game, having participated in a pair of training camps, but never playing for the national team. Not in a million years did Hill believe Edwards might actually be questioning whether he belonged on Team USA.

"I think it was the uncertainty of doing something outside of his norm," Edwards' longtime manager, Justin Holland, told ESPN. "He'd never been out of the country. He'd always liked to work out by himself in the summers. So it was more about putting himself into an environment he's not all the way in control of."

Such introspection is difficult to reconcile with the ultra-confident, effervescent young star who has become the face of this season's playoffs. But it's a reflection of just how far Edwards has come in a year: suffering from imposter syndrome to the poster child for this new generation of NBA superstars.

Just two weeks ago, the Timberwolves swept one of Edwards' idols, Kevin Durant, and the Phoenix Suns in the first round. The Wolves have pushed the defending champion Denver Nuggets further than any opponent has in two years -- to a Game 7 on Sunday (8 p.m. ET on TNT).

Not only did he become, in head coach Steve Kerr's words, "the man" for Team USA last summer, he's breathed new life into a Timberwolves franchise that has toiled in mediocrity and dysfunction since trading Kevin Garnett in 2007.

Throughout this season, the 22-year-old Edwards has been, despite his youth, Minnesota's unquestioned leader on the court and off, in moments public and private, and he has fueled his team to within one game of its first Western Conference finals appearance in 20 years.