AAndrew Wiggins was one of the first up-and-coming superstars of the social media era. Wiggins was born in Thornhill, Ontario, north of Toronto, and by the age of 13 he had become a household name. Being the center of attention hasn't always been easy for a shy guy from a small town.
After just one full season at Vaughan, Wiggins needed more competition than Canada could provide and transferred to Huntington Prep in Huntington, West Virginia, a relatively new prep school located in a small, blue-collar, sports-oriented college town near Kansas.
Head coach Rob Fulford had been recruiting Wiggins since he was 13, once personally observing 24 straight CIA games. “We developed a relationship with him,” Fulford said. “We recruited him harder than anyone else.”
What made Fulford stand out was the same quality that would later get young Wiggins into trouble, namely, that everything he did looked so easy. “He could just dominate the game from a talent standpoint,” Fulford says. “There was just a clear difference between Andrew and everyone else.”
But there was nothing quiet about the show Wiggins put on on the basketball court, as Huntington quickly became the most popular high school team in the country, from 50 fans at a typical home game before his arrival to packed gyms with more than 1,000 fans to see the Canadian high school phenom in person. “A lot of people just wanted to see him play,” Ratan-Mays says. “We tried to put on the best show we could every night.”
But it wasn't easy for the quiet kid from Vaughan to be at the center of the basketball universe. After all, shyness, like athleticism, runs in the Wiggins family: Wiggins' father, Mitchell Sr., said the reason it didn't work out at his first college, Clemson, was because “I was so quiet you couldn't even get a whisper out of me.” And his mother's teammate, Marita, said: “She was very quiet, still is very quiet and very humble.”
Unlike LeBron James, who was happy to talk to the media and put on a show for the public ever since he was nicknamed “The Chosen One” as a teenager, Wiggins was quiet and shy, preferring to direct the attention to his teammates instead of beating his chest after a big dunk. Many people wanted Wiggins to be a version of the alpha athlete they were used to seeing on TV, like James and Kobe Bryant. And that dissonance created tension with the basketball media and some segments of fans who wanted more from Wiggins.
“I think we all have a certain idea of what we want a great athlete to look like,” says his junior team coach, Roy Rana. “We want them to be fiery. We want them to be emotional. We want them to be extroverted. We want them to be demonstrative. That's not Andrew.”
Criticism intensified during Wiggins' second and final season at Huntington Prep, when a February 2013 Sports Illustrated article questioned his work ethic, suggesting he only appeared in big games while missing less important ones. “Andrew Wiggins' work ethic and motor have not yet caught up with his athleticism and raw ability,” the report said, citing examples of previous Canadian prospects whose careers stalled due to poor decision-making or a lack of skill development. And it cast doubt on the role models in his life, including his father, who was forced out NBA for using cocaine decades ago.
The day after the article was published, Wiggins scored a career-high 57 points. “I think it made him angry,” Fulford says. “He wanted to prove a point.”
“I just respond positively,” Wiggins says. “I don’t say anything, I don’t… I go on Twitter and I say something… whenever you think you have something to say, just go out on the court and do my thing.”
Wiggins had one of the most memorable campaigns in high school basketball history that season, averaging 23 points, 11 rebounds, three assists and three blocks per game while also winning the Naismith Prep Player of the Year and Gatorade National Player of the Year awards, earning a trip to the McDonald's All-American Game. After that, he left to attend the University of Kansas.
But the attention didn't end there. In fact, when Wiggins arrived at Kansas City International Airport in June 2013, he walked out of the gate to find 15 fans waiting for his autograph after his route was posted on an online bulletin board. As classes began, students began stalking him on Twitter, tweeting photos of the back of his head in class and posting his whereabouts when he was spotted in local stores. Meanwhile, back home in Canada, Wiggins earned the nicknames “Maple Jordan” and “Air Canada” and all of his Kansas games were nationally televised on TSN.
While it may all seem normal now, 2013 marked the beginning of the social media era. And between fans hounding him, student groups mocking him at away games, and a rapidly expanding media landscape criticizing his every move, Wiggins found it difficult to feel comfortable. “We talk about it sometimes, but he doesn't like to talk about it. It stresses him out so much,” his wife Mychal Johnson said at the time. “Sometimes he doesn't know what to do.”
“It was a lot,” Wiggins says now. “It was a lot.”
Wiggins just wanted to be a normal kid. He loved basketball and was really good at it, but wanted to live a normal life away from the spotlight, playing Call of Duty after games and announcing his college decision without the media present. In fact, his Twitter bio read: “Just a regular kid trying to make it big.”
But when asked about it during his freshman year at Kansas, Wiggins responded, “When I talked about it, I was just a normal kid. But that… was just a little while ago.”
Some criticism of Wiggins was justified. Even Fulford admitted that he wasn't a gym fan—that it all came so naturally to Wiggins that he needed to fall in love with the process of improvement if he was going to hit his ceiling. “I don't think anyone ever had to tell Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant to take him,” Fulford said.
Wiggins gradually improved under head coach Bill Self at Kansas, averaging 17 points, six rebounds, two assists, one steal and one block as a rookie for the second-ranked Jayhawks, who went 24-9 before losing in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. He even set the Kansas freshman single-season scoring record with 597 points.
However, there were times when Self had to force Wiggins to play harder or more aggressively on offense, instituting a special rule in some practices that only Wiggins was allowed to shoot. “Andrew is the kind of guy who can score 28 points and you'll say, 'Why didn't he score more?' Self said. “Critics want him to do more. I understand that because acting comes so easily to him, it comes so naturally.”
Part of that reticence on the court was due to the way Wiggins was raised, learning the game from his brothers and father, who had a 20-year professional career as a guard. “His dad taught him how to play basketball the right way,” Reed-Knight said, noting that Mitchell Sr. always stressed the importance of dedication and making good reads. “Play your own game and don’t force action.”
After one season at Kansas, Wiggins declared for the 2014 NBA Draft and was selected first overall by the Cleveland Cavaliers—a foregone conclusion since Wiggins was in 10th grade. What made the selection even more surprising was that his CIA Bounce teammate, Brampton native Anthony Bennett, had gone first overall to Cleveland the year before, giving Canada back-to-back first overall selections for the first time in history.
The 2014 NBA Draft also included Canadians Tyler Ennis, Nik Stauskas and Dwight Powell, giving Canada a record 12 NBA players. That year, Canada overtook France to become the second most represented country in the league behind the United States, a record it has held ever since.
However, that same summer, the world's best player, James, returned to his hometown of Cleveland as a free agent. And before playing a single game in the NBA, Wiggins and Bennett were traded to the rebuilding Minnesota Timberwolves for Kevin Love, making Wiggins the cornerstone of a franchise that hadn't made the playoffs in 10 years. “I just gave up and decided I was going to be good wherever I went,” Wiggins said. “Everything worked out. [Minnesota has] put me in a situation where I can grow a lot more than the team that drafted me.”
Wiggins started his NBA career slowly before breaking out against a team that had neglected him, dropping 27 points in his first game against James's Cavaliers. He followed that up with six straight 20-point games, ultimately becoming the first Canadian to win the NBA Rookie of the Year award, averaging 17 points, five rebounds and two assists per game during the 2014–15 season.
While he never blossomed into the NBA superstar that many predicted when he was a teenager, Wiggins had an incredible career, spending five and a half seasons in Minnesota before being traded to the Golden State Warriors in 2020. points and nine rebounds.
But, for better or worse, the enormous attention and unbalanced criticism that began pouring in on Wiggins when he was a phenomenal teenager never left him, especially in Canada, a basketball-mad country that was hungry for a superstar.
As Wiggins once said, “I know I can never live up to expectations.”
