Andrew Wiggins was among the first superstar prospects of the social media era. Born in Thornhill, Ontario just north of Toronto, Wiggins was known internationally by the time he was 13. It wasn’t always easy for the shy, small-town kid to embrace the spotlight.

After just one full season at Vaughan, Wiggins needed better competition than Canada could provide and moved on to Huntington Prep in Huntington, West Virginia — a relatively new prep school set in a small, blue-collar, sports-oriented college town near Kansas.

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The head 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 stood out to Fulford was the same quality that would later get the young Wiggins in trouble, which was that everything he did looked so effortless. “He could just dominate a game from a talent perspective,” Fulford says. “It just was a clear difference between Andrew and everyone else.”

But there was nothing quiet about the show Wiggins was putting 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 prior to his arrival to packed gyms with over 1,000 fans there to see the Canadian high school phenom with their own eyes. “A lot of people just wanted to see him play,” Rathan-Mayes says. “We tried to go and put on a show the best that we could every single night.”

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But being at the centre of the basketball universe didn’t come naturally to the quiet kid from Vaughan. After all, shyness, like athleticism, runs in the Wiggins family: Wiggins’s father, Mitchell Sr, said the reason it didn’t work at his first college, Clemson, was that “I was so quiet, you couldn’t get a whisper out of me.” While a track teammate of his mother, Marita, said, “She was very quiet, still is very quiet and very unassuming.”

Unlike LeBron James, who was happy to engage with the media and put on a show for the crowd since being crowned “The Chosen One” as a teenager, Wiggins was soft-spoken and shy, preferring to pass the attention on to his teammates instead of beating his chest after a big dunk. Many people wanted Wiggins to be the version of an alpha athlete that they were used to seeing on TV, like James and Kobe Bryant. And that dissonance created a tension with the basketball media and certain 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 look like,” his junior national team coach, Roy Rana, says. “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.”

The criticism picked up during Wiggins’s second and final season at Huntington Prep when, in February of 2013, a Sports Illustrated article questioned his work ethic, suggesting that he only showed up in big games while lofting through less important ones. “Andrew Wiggins’ work ethic and motor have yet to catch up to his athleticism and raw ability,” it read, bringing up examples of previous Canadian prospects whose careers stagnated as a result of poor decision-making or a lack of skill development. And it questioned the role models in his life, including his father, who was pushed out of the NBA for cocaine use decades earlier.

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The day after the article came out, Wiggins dropped a career-high 57 points in a statement win. “I think it pissed him off,” Fulford says. “He wanted to prove a point.”

“Just responding in a positive way,” Wiggins says. “Not saying anything, not … going on Twitter and saying anything … whenever you think you got something to say, just go on the court 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 the Gatorade National Player of the Year awards, earning a trip to the McDonald’s All-American Game. After that, he left to go to the University of Kansas.

But the spotlight didn’t stop there. In fact, when Wiggins arrived at Kansas City International Airport in June of 2013, he emerged from the gate to find 15 fans waiting for his autograph after his itinerary had been posted on an online message board. When classes started, students began Twitter-stalking him, tweeting pictures of the back of his head in class and posting his whereabouts when he was spotted at local stores. Meanwhile, back home in Canada, Wiggins picked up the nicknames “Maple Jordan” and “Air Canada,” and all of his Kansas games were broadcasted on the national TV network TSN.

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While all this might seem normal now, 2013 was the beginning of the social media era. And between the fans stalking 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 talking about it. That’s how bad 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 happened to love basketball and be really good at it, but he wanted an average life away from the spotlight, playing Call of Duty after games and announcing his college decision without any media present. In fact, his Twitter bio used to read “Just a average kid trying to make it.”

But when he was asked about it during his freshman year at Kansas, Wiggins said, “I used to be an average kid, when I put that up. But that … was a while ago.”

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Some of the criticism directed towards Wiggins was warranted. Even Fulford acknowledged that he was no gym rat – that things came so naturally to Wiggins that he needed to fall in love with the process of improving if he was going to reach his ceiling. “I don’t think at any point ever that anyone had to go tell Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant to pick it up,” Fulford said.

Wiggins quietly improved under head coach Bill Self at Kansas, averaging 17 points, six rebounds, two assists, one steal, and one block as a freshman for the No 2-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.

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

Some of that on-court reticence came from the way Wiggins was raised, learning the game from his brothers and dad, who carved out a 20-year pro career as a defensive role player. “His dad taught him how to play basketball the right way,” Reid-Knight says, noting that Mitchell Sr always harped on the importance of being selfless and making the right reads. “Playing within your game and not forcing 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 since Wiggins was in 10th grade. What made the selection even more amazing was that his CIA Bounce teammate, Brampton native Anthony Bennett, went first overall to Cleveland the year prior, giving Canada back-to-back first overall picks for the first time ever.

The 2014 NBA Draft also featured Canadians Tyler Ennis, Nik Stauskas, and Dwight Powell, giving Canada a record 12 NBA players. That year Canada overtook France as 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 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 had not been to the playoffs in 10 years. “I just gave in to it and figured I’d be good wherever I go,” Wiggins said. “The whole thing has worked out. [Minnesota has] put me in a situation where I can grow a lot more than on the team that drafted me.”

Wiggins got off to a slow start in his NBA career before breaking out against the team that snubbed him, dropping 27 points in his first game against James’s Cavaliers. He followed it up with a stretch 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 a game in 2014–15.

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While he never turned into the NBA superstar that many people had him pegged to become when he was a teenager, Wiggins went on to have an incredible career, spending five and a half seasons in Minnesota before getting traded to the Golden State Warriors in 2020. In the Bay, Wiggins became the third Canadian 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 huge spotlight and unbalanced criticism that started to shine on Wiggins when he was a teenage phenom never left him, especially in Canada – a basketball-crazed nation that was growing hungry for a superstar.

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

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