Andrew Wiggins: How a shy NBA player tackled growing up as a star in the social media age

Andrew Wiggins was among the first potential superstars of the social media age. Born in Thornhill, Ontario, just north of Toronto, Wiggins was internationally known by the time he was 13. It hasn’t always been easy for the shy small-town boy to accept the spotlight.

After only one full season in Vaughan, Wiggins needed better competition than Canada could offer and transferred to Huntington Prep in Huntington, West Virginia, a relatively new prep school located in a small, sports-oriented college town near Kansas.

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The coach, Rob Fulford, had been recruiting Wiggins since he was 13, at one point watching 24 consecutive CIA Bounce games in person. “We developed a relationship with him,” Fulford said. “We recruited him harder than anyone else.”

What struck Fulford was the same quality that would later get the young Wiggins into trouble, namely that everything he did seemed so simple. “He could just dominate a game from a talent standpoint,” Fulford says. “It was just a clear difference between Andrew and everyone else.”

But there was nothing quiet about the spectacle Wiggins was putting on on the basketball court, as Huntington quickly became the most popular high school team in the country, going from having 50 fans at a regular home game before his arrival to packed gyms with over 1,000 fans there to see the Canadian high school phenomenon with their own eyes. “A lot of people just wanted to see him play,” Rathan-Mayes says. “We tried to put on a show as best we could every single night.”

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But being at the center of the basketball universe didn’t come naturally to the quiet boy from Vaughan. 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 that “I was so quiet you couldn’t get a whisper out of me.” While a teammate of her mother, Marita, said: “She was very quiet, she is still very quiet and very modest.”

Unlike LeBron James, who was happy to interact with the media and put on a show for the crowd since he was crowned “The Chosen One” as a teenager, Wiggins was soft-spoken and shy, preferring to shift the focus to his teammates instead of beating his chest after a big dunk. Many people wanted Wiggins to be the version of an 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 the fan base, who wanted more from Wiggins.

“I think we all have a certain kind of perception of what we want a great athlete to be like,” says his junior national team coach, Roy Rana. “We want them to be fiery. We want them to be emotional. We want them to be outgoing. We want them to be outgoing. That’s not Andrew.”

Criticism was raised during Wiggins’ second and final season at Huntington Prep when, in February 2013, a Sports Illustrated article questioned his work ethic, suggesting that he only appeared in the most important games while taking on less important ones. “Andrew Wiggins’ work ethic and motor ethic have yet to catch up to his athleticism and raw skill,” it reads, citing examples of previous Canadian prospects whose careers have stagnated due to poor decision making or a lack of skill development. And he questioned the role models in his life, including his father, who had been kicked out of the NBA for cocaine use decades earlier.

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The day after the article was published, Wiggins dropped a career-high 57 points in a total victory. “I think it pissed him off,” Fulford says. “He wanted to prove a point.”

“I’m just responding positively,” Wiggins says. “Don’t say anything, don’t…go on Twitter and say something…every time you think you have something to say, go out there and do my thing.”

Wiggins compiled 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 and 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. He later left to attend the University of Kansas.

But the spotlight didn’t stop there. In fact, when Wiggins arrived at Kansas City International Airport in June 2013, he emerged from the gate to find 15 fans waiting for his autograph after his itinerary was posted on an online bulletin board. When classes started, 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 took on the nicknames “Maple Jordan” and “Air Canada” and all of his Kansas games were broadcast on the national television network TSN.

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While this might seem normal today, 2013 marked the beginning of the social media era. And between the fans hounding him, the student sections taunting him at away games and the rapidly expanding media landscape criticizing his every move, it was hard for Wiggins to feel comfortable. “We talk about it sometimes, but he doesn’t like to talk about it. It’s how much it stresses him out,” 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 he wanted a normal life away from the spotlight, playing Call of Duty after games and announcing his college decision without the presence of the media. In fact, his Twitter bio read “Just an average guy trying to make it.”

But when asked about it during his freshman year at Kansas, Wiggins said, “I was a normal kid when I posted that. But that… happened a while ago.”

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Some of the criticism directed at Wiggins was justified. Even Fulford acknowledged that he wasn’t a gym fanatic: that things came so naturally to Wiggins that he needed to fall in love with the process of improvement if he wanted to reach his peak. “I don’t think at any point did anyone have to tell Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant to retire it,” Fulford said.

Wiggins quietly improved under coach Bill Self at Kansas, averaging 17 points, six rebounds, two assists, one steal and one block as a freshman for the No. 1 Jayhawks. 2 in the league, who went 24-9 before losing in the second round of the NCAA tournament. He also set the Kansas freshman single-season scoring record with 597 points.

However, there were times when Self had to get Wiggins to play harder or be more aggressive on offense, instituting a special rule in some practices that only Wiggins could shoot. “Andrew is the type of guy who could score 28 points, and you’d say, ‘Why didn’t he score more?’” Self said. “The critics want him to do more. I understand that, because the game comes so easy to him, it’s so natural.”

Part of that on-court reticence stemmed from the way Wiggins grew up, learning the game from his brothers and father, who carved out 20-year pro careers as a defensive role player. “His dad taught him to play basketball the right way,” Reid-Knight says, noting that Mitchell Sr always insisted on the importance of being unselfish and making the right reads. “Play within your game and don’t force an action.”

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After one season at Kansas, Wiggins declared for the 2014 NBA Draft and was selected first overall by the Cleveland Cavaliers – a foregone conclusion given that Wiggins was in the sixth grade. What made the selection even more surprising was the fact 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 picks for the first time ever.

The 2014 NBA Draft also included Canadians Tyler Ennis, Nik Stauskas and Dwight Powell, giving Canada an NBA-record 12 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, the best player in the world, James, returned to his hometown of Cleveland in free agency that same summer. And before playing a single game in the NBA, Wiggins and Bennett were both traded to the rebuilding Minnesota Timberwolves in exchange for Kevin Love, making Wiggins the cornerstone of a franchise that hadn’t been to the playoffs in 10 years. “I gave up and thought I would be good wherever I went,” Wiggins said. “Everything worked. [Minnesota has] put myself in a situation where I can grow much more than the team that chose me.”

Wiggins had a slow start to his NBA career before falling out with the team that snubbed him, dropping 27 points in his first game against James’s Cavaliers. He followed that up with a streak of six straight 20-point games, eventually becoming the first Canadian to win the NBA Rookie of the Year award after averaging 17 points, five rebounds and two assists per game in 2014-2015.

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While he never became the NBA superstar many thought he would become as 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. In the Bay, Wiggins became Canada’s third NBA All-Star and won an NBA championship as the team’s second-leading scorer in the 2022 NBA Finals, when he averaged 18 points and nine rebounds.

But, for better or worse, the spotlight and unbalanced criticism that began to shine on Wiggins when he was a teenage phenomenon has never left him, especially in Canada, a basketball-crazy nation increasingly hungry for a superstar.

As Wiggins once said, “I know I can never live up to expectations.”

• This is an excerpt from The Golden Generation: How Canada Became a Basketball Powerhouse by Oren Weisfeld. It is published by ECW Press for $19.95 (USD) wherever you get your books.