While the two teams have never met in the postseason, there is no shortage of history between the Warriors and Timberwolves. It’s a return to the second market Jimmy Butler finagled his way out of, as well as another episode in the long-running feud between Draymond Green and Rudy Gobert.

On the lighter side, the matchup also reunites coach Steve Kerr with Minnesota’s young superstar, Anthony Edwards, who has spoken to the impact the Warriors coach had on his career even before they teamed up for Team USA in Paris last summer.

“He was amazing to coach,” Kerr said on a conference call Monday afternoon, reclining on his hotel bed in Minneapolis shortly after the Warriors’ arrival. “I love his energy. I love his infectious enthusiasm for the game. There’s a reason why the Wolves are where they are right now. ... They are where they are because Ant is a superstar.”

Edwards, now 23, has repeatedly credited Kerr with helping him understand what it took to get to that level when they worked him out leading up to the 2020 draft.

The Warriors would eventually select James Wiseman with the No. 2 pick after Edwards went first overall to the Timberwolves. But before that played out, Kerr, then-general manager Bob Myers and owner Joe Lacob flew to Atlanta, where they were unimpressed with the young prospect’s work ethic and told him as much.

“Before he came, I thought I was working hard,” Edwards told reporters in 2023. “When he came, I was going through the drills and he kept stopping them, like, ‘That’s all you got? That’s all you got?’ I’m like, ‘Bro, I’m going as hard as you want me to go. What do you want me to do?’ ...

“Me and my trainer ran home after and we were just talking, like, ‘Bro, we gotta pick it up. I don’t know how, I don’t know what we gotta do, but we gotta pick it up.’ I think after that, I became a madman in the gym.”

According to Kerr, there was plenty of room for improvement. He went into detail about what he saw during the private session.

“We’re the only five people in the whole gym (with Edwards and his trainer), and after 15 minutes of just watching him lazily shoot 15-footers, I thought, ‘When’s the workout gonna start?’ It turned out that was the workout,” Kerr said with a chuckle. “I just went down there and said, ‘Hey, can we see something more?’ I think he was kind of surprised.”

“He was like, ‘Man, you’ve gotta see Steph and Klay and KD work out,’ ” Edwards said in 2023. “We went to dinner that night and they still was continuously telling me, ‘Man, you didn’t work hard enough. If we had the No. 1 pick, we wouldn’t take you.’ ”

Of course, it never came to that. And, according to Kerr, Edwards won over the Warriors during a second workout two weeks later that was “way better.” He admitted the Warriors “weren’t sure” after the first workout. “After the second one, we were sure,” Kerr said. “You could see he was just exploding with talent and charisma.”

The rest is history, and Kerr now faces the task of game planning for the dynamic scoring threat over the course of a best-of-seven series that began Tuesday in Minnesota.

Since entering the league at age 19, the high-flying 6-foot-4 shooting guard has averaged 23.9 points per game and took it to a new high in his fifth season, scoring 27.6 per game while adding another option to his toolkit, shooting a career-best 39.5% from beyond the arc.

Kerr got an up-close look at Edwards this summer as a young pup on a veteran-laden national team but as far as game-planning goes, “The main insight I have is that he’s really damn good, so I don’t know how that helps us prepare,” he said. The circumstances led to Edwards taking a back seat to Curry, Durant and LeBron James, but that didn’t stop him from showing off his true self — or slow his swagger — at practice.

“They’d have these shooting contests and he’d be right in the middle of it, talking all kinds of trash,” Kerr said. “It’s such a big part of who he is. His love for the game, his love for competition. But it’s all in a really good-spirited way. There’s never anything malicious about the trash talk.

“He loves what he does and loves to compete. The guys around him really enjoy the banter, too, because it’s always in a humorous fashion.”

Little did he know that day in Atlanta five years ago would ignite all this.

Edwards dethroned Durant in last year’s playoffs. He eliminated James in five games last round. Now he’s coming for Curry, Kerr and the Warriors.

“I didn’t really think much of it at the time,” Kerr said. “I didn’t really realize it was that big of a deal, but it was pretty cool that he said that. I think it shows that he’s a young guy that wants to learn, wants to be great.”