Anthony Edwards is not Michael Jordan. Anyone compelled to make another deranged, the-face-of-Jesus-is-in-my-potato-chip mythological comparison between the two should remember words that Jordan once said: “Stop it. Get some help.” The Minnesota Timberwolves have defeated the Denver Nuggets and are now in the Western Conference Finals, and they are themselves. They are not the Chicago Bulls, finally defeating the Detroit Pistons in 1991. I mean, why would they be? Most of the team was not even alive when that happened, so how could they be those guys?

Karl-Anthony Towns, when presented with these sorts of historic parallels, laughed them out of the room. Following their Game 7 victory, a reporter asked him for some meaning-making, on the matter of the Wolves supposedly skipping steps in their ascendent young contender origin story. “We lost last year!” Towns replied. “How much more do we gotta lose?” The Ringz Codex does not cohere for Towns, nor for Edwards, who sat next to him laughing and agreeing. Edwards doesn’t want to be compared to Jordan, either, for the record. That’s someone else’s story, and he never asked to be a character in it.

The tale the Wolves are telling, instead, is too current to summarize, but one writer is onto something by likening them to “the 2003-04 Pistons… if you had put Dwyane Wade on that team.” If there’s a mold this squad is formed in, that’s the closest I’ve heard to a useful description of it, though two distinctly not-the-classic-Chicago-Bulls options also come to mind: the Bad Boy Pistons, a group of great size and physical intensity directed by two steadfast guards—one iconically ferocious, the other more mild-mannered and smooth; and the 2008-2010 Los Angeles Lakers, featuring an all-time talent at shooting guard to go with three frontcourt studs owning the paint, plus a generational wing defender.

Of course, Edwards is not Isiah Thomas or Kobe Bryant, nor is Mike Conley Joe Dumars, while Towns, Rudy Gobert, and Naz Reid are not Bill Laimbeer, Rick Mahorn, James Edwards, Lamar Odom, Pau Gasol, or Andrew Bynum. Jaden McDaniels is neither Dennis Rodman nor Ron Artest, even if his ill-advised attempt at an unsportsmanlike self-lob might put him in their rare realm of neuro-competitive behavior—sort of like how he passionately punched a wall last year, sidelining him from the previous go-around with the Nuggets. But, still, all of these guys are themselves. We haven’t seen them before, and we haven’t seen what happens next.

Behold! As they host the Dallas Mavericks for the first two games of the playoff’s penultimate round, a new chapter begins. No one’s read it yet. It will feature an exonerated Towns, who was arguably his team’s best player in their close-out game, grabbing validation after years of ridicule and doubt. It will also feature a version of Gobert who has now made a clutch 18-foot turnaround jumper over a three-time MVP. They will go up against a Mavericks team also starring several players who have recently bloomed into different, unprecedented versions of themselves.

P.J. Washington, acquired from the Charlotte Hornets in February, is a proud Dallas native who’s stepped up his shooting and defense in the first meaningful games of his career. Dereck Lively is a rookie center whose energy tipped a pivotal Game 6 against the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Mavericks’ direction; he’ll have to pair with Daniel Gafford—like Washington, also glowing up under the brightest lights he’s ever seen—to deal with the tri-center leviathan that Nikola Jokic couldn’t solve by himself.

They’ll get a lot of help from the best lob thrower in the business, Luka Doncic, the great composer who makes the athleticism around him into an orchestra. Doncic has had just as much “it’s about to be his league” hype around him as Edwards in his still-young career, and the eager historians will be falling over each other to hand the gravity of the next one-to-two weeks of basketball to one of them. There's so much cultural and financial anxiety about which player is excellent and charismatic to be a one-man tentpole for the league that the series will be covered in the shadow of this concern.

But the real life of it will be different. The last and only time these teams met in the postseason, Wally Szczerbiak and Raef LaFrentz were present. There is not much precedent for the collision of their respective lores, or for how it will feel or look when either team breaks through to the Finals. In the 2024 NBA, regime change has arrived, and old templates won’t tell us what's coming. The young men with the ball in their hands aren’t following old bibles about how to win, closely mimicking anyone who came before them, or sticking to their reputational patterns. We still wait to describe their actions.