Timberwolves' trade for Rudy Gobert sets the bar high for Anthony Edwards, Jaden McDaniels

The Timberwolves announced many things to their fans and the league at large with the acquisition of Rudy Gobert. They said they weren't content with the success they achieved last season, and they believed that two big men making over a combined $400 million could work in a league that has gone smaller in recent years.

To make that work, the Wolves are going to need two members of their starting lineup to make the kind of leap the Wolves think they can make — Anthony Edwards and Jaden McDaniels.

Edwards is 20 years old; McDaniels is 21.

There is no more waiting for the future for either of them. The future has to be now for the Wolves to have designs on making deep playoff runs.

If the win-now move for Gobert is going to work, both are going to need to make massive jumps in their third season after arriving with the Wolves in the 2020 draft — Edwards to an All-Star-level player, McDaniels to a consistent shutdown defender who can stay out of foul trouble and knock down threes at a reasonable rate on the offensive end after shooting 34% from deep his first two seasons.

"We understand we can't put too much on their plate or be irresponsible with our expectations in the short term," President Tim Connelly said.

It's going to be hard not to do that. Edwards (21.3 points per game, 36% three-point shooting) has shown how brilliant he can be in stretches. He also had stretches when inconsistency plagued him, especially when teams decided to focus a lot of their attention on him with varied coverages.

One of the biggest things Edwards was working on throughout last season was dealing with the increased attention, which was a difficult transition at times.

"I still don't make a lot of reads that I should make to soften the defense up," Edwards said just after the season ended. "But I will after this summer."

That is something younger stars have to deal with in playoff series, and it was something Edwards dealt with in the Wolves' loss to Memphis after playing a sterling Game 1.

If the Wolves get the version of McDaniels they got in their Game 6 loss to the Grizzlies, they'd be more than happy with that. McDaniels had perhaps the best game of his career that night with 24 points.

Even those stars who are slightly older than Edwards, like Boston's Jayson Tatum, 24, ran into inconsistency with teams zeroing in on their every weakness in a playoff series.

Playoff experience can be invaluable, but youth doesn't preclude teams from being competitive or making deep runs. Luka Doncic, 23, led the Mavericks to the Western Conference finals while Memphis took the eventual champion in Golden State to six games in the second round with multiple starters who were 23 and under, including point guard Ja Morant.

When asked whether he thought McDaniels and Edwards could be starters on teams that made deep playoff runs, Connelly said: "Yeah I do. I think we have to believe that."

"We have to empower those guys," Connelly said. "The experience they had this year was invaluable. They've seen a lot of basketball, despite their youth. There's not a shortage of teams out there that are showing they can make runs with guys. The team we lost to [in Memphis] had a very young roster."

Coach Chris Finch said it was important not to get too far ahead thinking where the Wolves might go in the postseason.

"Just to start backwards at a deep playoff run and reverse engineer it is probably unfair for this group right now," Finch said. "We still have young players that we need to have keep growing and growing."

Connelly said the Wolves have a "neat setup" in terms of how the ages on the roster breakdown. Gobert, 30, Towns, 27. and D'Angelo Russell, 26, are at the peaks of their careers. Edwards and McDaniels are young and ascending.

Just how fast they do can determine how far the Wolves go.