Timberwolves Summer League head coach Kevin Hanson noted the Wolves wanted to get Terrence Shannon Jr. more burn with the big league club in Shannon’s rookie campaign.

“We all knew he would be ready,” Hanson said.

But the firmly solidified eight-man rotation flush with proven players all deserving of hefty minute loads often prevented Shannon’s opportunities from arising.

But when his chances did come, the rookie often seized them. From a 25-point performance in Los Angeles against the Lakers to a double double in Minnesota’s stunning comeback in Oklahoma City in February to scoring 15 points in 13 minutes in Game 3 of the Western Conference Finals, the 24-year-old’s flashes were blindingly brilliant.

And all of the success has the wing feeling ultra confident heading into his second Summer League. Minnesota opens play in Las Vegas on Thursday.

“We expect him to probably be our leading scorer,” Hanson said.

It’s a safe bet.

“I would say I’m always confident, but it’s a little different,” Shannon said. “I’m more confident than I was last summer, but that just comes with work. The more you work, I feel like the more confident you are.”

And Shannon made a point to not only work during his rookie campaign, but also learn. He was frequently asking his more experienced teammates for insights and information and trying to apply those to sharpen his craft, particularly on the defensive end.

It’s now proven that Shannon can score. He’s perhaps the NBA team’s most dangerous transition freight train who can get to the free throw line and also proved he could knock down a jumper. They’re all reasons he was one of the best scorers in college basketball as a senior at Illinois in the 2023-24 campaign.

It wouldn’t be a surprise to see him score 30 points in a Summer League bout this month. But Shannon doesn’t have any goals of that sort. He simply wants to showcase his skills, win games and contend for a championship, even if it’s of the Summer League variety. He’ll enter the gym in Las Vegas this week feeling he has nothing to prove.

“I’m just looking to dominate,” Shannon said. “Just showcase my talent, win these games, just be the best version of myself.”

That extends well beyond scoring. Minnesota plans to push Shannon this month on both ends of the floor.

“We really want to see him defend. We’re going to put him on some tough tasks out there, and we want to see him take on those tough tasks while scoring, as well,” Hanson said. “You’ve got to do both. You’ve got to be a two-way player.”

And he’s got to be a multi-faceted offensive threat. Shannon’s primary form of offensive attack last season was putting his head down and getting to the rack, either in transition or by playing off the catch. That’s a necessary skill, no question. But Minnesota needs players outside of Anthony Edwards who can create off the bounce, both for themselves and others.

Hanson noted Minnesota plans to put Shannon in two-man actions where he’ll have to read the defense and make decisions. And he’ll have to do all of that while being the top item on opposing defensive gameplans.

That’s a far different scenario than where Shannon found himself in the West Finals, when he was where the Thunder would attempt to hide their big man out on the perimeter.

“So it’ll be fun to watch him navigate through that,” Hanson said.

This is the next step in the wing’s progression. One he has to take if he’s to seamlessly step into Minnesota’s rotation in place of the Nickeil Alexander-Walker, who is off to Atlanta via a sign-and-trade free-agent deal.

Opportunity awaits for the second-year player here in Minnesota.

“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about it,” Shannon said of what’s to come next season. “But I’m also living where my feet are, and that’s Summer League. But of course I’ve thought about it. That’s why I’m working as well as I am right now.”

This is the training grounds to set up what’s to come.

“It was just a matter of time,” Hanson said. “There’s no turning back now.”

Minnesota Timberwolves guard Terrence Shannon Jr., right, takes the ball to the hoop as Utah Jazz guard Collin Sexton (2) defends during the first half of an NBA basketball game Friday, Feb. 28, 2025, in Salt Lake City. (AP Photo/Rick Egan)

Byron Buxton is looking forward to participating in next Monday’s Home Run Derby, calling it a “once in a lifetime” opportunity. That’s because the event is being held in Atlanta, just hours away from his hometown of Baxley, Ga.

But it seems nobody is more excited about the center fielder’s inclusion in the derby field than his 11-year-old son, Brixton.

“He always is like, ‘Dad, if you do this, I want to bring you a towel!’ And I’m like, ‘All right.’ That’s all he cares about,” Buxton said of his oldest son. “He wants dad to do it so he can bring me a towel and a Gatorade. And for me, that’s special. Out of everybody that’s there, all the people that he’s going to see, that’s what he wants and cares about. So it’s the small things that add up to the big ones.”

Buxton announced his plans to compete in the derby on his Instagram account one day after he was named the Twins’ lone representative in the All-Star Game. It will be his second Midsummer Classic but the first time he has participated in the derby.

For Buxton, who has already hit 20 home runs this season, the decision to participate was made after talking it over with those around him.

“When you’re healthy and you have the opportunities that come across to be able to do some things like this, you don’t tend to pass them up,” he said.

Buxton will be the first Twin to participate in the event since his former teammate, Miguel Sanó, did so in 2017. Just one Twin, Justin Morneau, has ever won the competition, edging out Josh Hamilton in 2008 in a derby that is best remembered for Hamilton’s record-setting first round.

He joins a field of eight players that so far includes Atlanta outfielder Ronald Acuña Jr., Washington outfielder James Wood and Seattle catcher Cal Raleigh, currently Major League Baseball’s home run leader with 35.

In the first round, all entrants will compete against a clock and each other to hit the most home runs, with the top four advancing to the semifinals. From there, players will be seeded by their first-round performance with No. 1 facing No. 4 and No. 2 competing against No. 3.

The first two rounds last three minutes per batter, and the final round is two minutes long, with a maximum number of pitches that a hitter can receive.

“It’s just one of those things where, going back home to do something like this is a once in a lifetime thing,” Buxton said. “I know I’m not going to play 30 more years for (the All-Star Game) to get back to Atlanta, so it’s that once in a lifetime opportunity that, I talked about it with some close people, guys on the team, friends, family, and everybody got excited. It’s just one of those things where, they didn’t want me to pass up the opportunity.”

Minnesota Twins’ Byron Buxton reacts after hitting a two-run home run during the third inning of a baseball game against the Detroit Tigers, Saturday, June 28, 2025, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Jose Juarez)

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Columnist’s note: Every year I choose a university student to accompany me on my win-a-trip journey, which is meant to highlight issues that deserve more attention. My 2025 winner is Sofia Barnett, a recent Brown University graduate and a budding journalist. Her first essay (“The quiet girls’ revolution in West Africa”, July 6), was about girls in West Africa challenging the tradition of female genital mutilation. Here’s her second, arguing that Western feminism should show more concern for global women’s issues.

— Nicholas Kristof

 

MAKENI, Sierra Leone — In Makeni, Sierra Leone, girls walk home from school with notebooks tucked under their arms and dust clinging to their socks. Their uniforms are clean but faded. Their routes are long. I met girls who walk five miles through washed-out roads to reach a classroom. Their futures depend on a fragile calculation — not just of effort, but of what they’re willing to trade to keep learning.

Here, there are girls who drop out because they can’t afford a sanitary pad. Girls who sell their bodies for the cost of a notebook. Some are proud of what they earn at night — $7, maybe — because it helps them stay enrolled. But that’s not opportunity. That’s extortion under the veil of agency.

Another young woman, Tity Sannoh, said menstruation is often where the trade begins. In the coastal town of Tombo, girls rely on boyfriends just to manage their period, she said. “If you give them something, they will give you something in return.”

Safieyatu Kiadii, a 16-year-old girl from the village of Vonzua in Liberia, said she dropped out of school after her father died. She now takes care of her mentally ill mother alone and lives with her in a one-room house. She isn’t ready to bear a child, she said, lifting her sleeve to show the birth control implant in her arm. She wants to become a nurse.

When I asked how girls learn about their bodies, most said they don’t. Mabinty Thoronka, a 19-year-old from Freetown, said her mother explained menstruation by saying only, “If you allow a boy to touch you, you are going to get pregnant.”

This is what systemic neglect looks like. Not just from governments, but from donors and the global feminist movement.

I came to West Africa to report on girls education. I left convinced that the Western feminist movement has grown far too comfortable fighting for itself. In America, we talk about Title IX, boardroom parity, the price of tampons — real fights, yes. But we rarely ask what rights look like in a place where school itself is conditional — on sex, on silence, on survival.

American feminism excels at diagnosing inequality where it lives: in wage gaps, courtroom bias, the absence of paid leave. But the need for gender equity is global, and it’s meaningless in practice if it excludes the millions of girls for whom empowerment is not a buzzword but a daily act of survival.

With the U.S. Agency for International Development gutted, crucial support has already pulled back from countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia. The girls I met know exactly what that means: fewer clinics, fewer supplies, fewer safe spaces to understand how their own bodies work.

They aren’t asking for pity. They’re asking for a chance.

Western feminism has matured legally, rhetorically and electorally. But it has failed to mature politically — in the sense Hannah Arendt described when she wrote of acting “in concert” across boundaries. A feminism content with national progress but indifferent to global inequality can’t consider itself a politics of freedom.

There is no liberation in a movement that refuses to ask whom it leaves behind. If some girls must bleed, beg or barter for the chance to learn, then feminism remains unfinished.

Dabah M. Varpilah, chair of the Health Committee in Liberia’s Senate, said that when you give a girl access to education, “allowing her to grow, make her own decisions, participate in leadership, then mindsets start changing.”

That belief runs deep in the communities I visited. Families pool coins to help teachers buy chalk. Some classrooms serve lunch twice a week — if a vendor shows up. Girls want better. Parents want more. But belief cannot patch the crumbling scaffolding of international commitment.

Nicholas Kristof writes a column for the New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018.

Can you hear it — that loud roar coming from the East? It’s the sound of 1.4 billion Chinese laughing at us.

The Chinese simply can’t believe their luck: that at the dawn of the electricity-guzzling era of artificial intelligence, the U.S. president and his party have decided to engage in one of the greatest acts of strategic self-harm imaginable. They have passed a giant bill that, among other craziness, deliberately undermines America’s ability to generate electricity through renewables — solar, battery and wind power in particular.

And why? Because they view those as “liberal” energy sources, even though today they are the quickest and cheapest ways to boost our electricity grid to meet the explosion of demand from A.I. data centers.

It is exactly the opposite of what China is doing. Indeed, Beijing may have to make July 4 its own national holiday going forward: American Electricity Dependence Day

Even Saudi Arabia

You cannot make this up: Even Saudi Arabia is doubling down on solar power to meet the needs of the A.I. data centers it wants to recruit from the West, while Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” actually does just the opposite. It quickly phases out tax credits enjoyed by utility-scale solar and wind — as well as electric vehicle tax credits. This virtually guarantees that China will own the future of solar energy, wind power, and electric cars and trucks, as well as autonomous vehicles.

Thankfully, Trump and friends did keep until 2036 a major Biden-era tax credit for companies that build other emissions-free technologies such as nuclear reactors, hydroelectric dams, geothermal plants and battery storage. The problem is that it can take up to 10 years to build a nuclear plant in America, and, as The New York Times reported, the bill added “complex restrictions” to the battery credits “that bar recipients from having ties to ‘prohibited foreign entities’ like China.’’ As a result, “some worry that the restrictions are so complicated that the credits could end up being unusable for many projects.”

In sum, this dog’s breakfast of a bill — rushed through without a single congressional hearing with independent energy experts or even one scientist — is sure to put at risk billions of dollars of investments in renewable energy, mostly in Republican states, and potentially kill the jobs of tens of thousands of U.S. workers. By the way, the bill also bans for 10 years a first-ever fee on excess methane emissions from oil and gas production, a key driver of global warming.

How does this make sense?

So, in one fell swoop, this bill will make your home hotter, your air conditioning bill higher, your clean energy job scarcer, America’s auto industry weaker and China happier. How does that make sense?

It doesn’t.

And the person in America who knows that best is actually Elon Musk. It is really sad to me that Musk — who is without question one of America’s greatest manufacturing innovators, having started globally leading companies making electric vehicles, renewable rockets, battery storage and telecommunications satellites — has discredited himself with so many voters because of his dalliance with Trump and because of his Department of Government Efficiency’s capricious cuts to the government workforce. Because of that, many will not understand the vital truth that Musk has been shouting to his fellow Americans: Trump’s bill is “utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”

This is not complicated and this is what China knows: There has never been a more intimate connection than there is now between a nation’s ability to generate huge amounts of electricity at affordable prices (and in the cleanest way possible) and its ability to develop AI engines that consume huge amounts of electricity as they learn and generate answers that could give us the tools we need to cure diseases, discover new materials and even produce the holy grail of cheap, clean, climate-saving fusion energy.

To put it differently, there has never been a more intimate connection between the amount of cheap, clean electricity a nation can generate for AI models and its future economic and military might.

That is why Musk and many others find it so “insane and destructive” that Trump and his GOP cult have rejected an energy policy of “all of the above as clean as possible as fast as possible” — oil, natural gas, coal, wind, hydro, nuclear, solar, geothermal, hydrogen — that is always working to phase out the dirtiest for the cleanest, the way China often has. Instead, Trump has chosen instead to kneecap America’s renewable energy industry the way China has not. The president has even called clean energy tax credits a “scam,” saying he’d rather spend the money anywhere else. This is industrial-scale foolishness.

I was struck by a quote from an energy expert in The Wall Street Journal the other day. “The big-picture outlook for energy is we are going to be less competitive because of this law,” said Nick Nigro of Atlas Public Policy. “Ten years from now, we could look back on this moment as the time in which the U.S. pulled back and essentially lost the transition to clean energy.”

Alas, truth be told, Democratic Party progressives helped to make Trump and his party this foolish on energy with their own crazy fantasies. Too many of them behaved as if we could go cold turkey from a fossil fuel economy to a clean and green one, without scaling cleaner fuels to bridge the transition, such as natural gas and nuclear, and without loosening permitting standards for more transmission lines to get clean power from the middle of the desert to the cities where it is needed.

China widens its lead

Few Americans understand how far ahead of us China already is in this realm and moving further ahead, and faster, every day.

Consider this snapshot: In 2000 China produced just over 1,300 terawatt hours of electricity while the U.S. produced nearly 3,800 (a terawatt is equal to 1 million megawatts). Fast forward to today, China produces over 10,000 terawatt hours while the U.S., since 2000, has added only 500 — an increase of only 13% in 2-1/2 decades. Much of China’s electricity growth originally came from expanded coal-fired generation, but in recent years, it has been driven by expanding hydro, solar, wind and battery sources, which are easier, cheaper and quicker to build and also help the climate.

As a recent article from Shanghai in the Financial Times put it: “China is on its way to becoming the world’s first ‘electrostate,’ with a growing share of its energy coming from electricity and an economy increasingly driven by clean technologies. It offers China a strategic buffer from trade decoupling and rising geopolitical tensions with the U.S.”

As for Trump’s goal of making America globally energy dominant during his term of office, his bill just made that impossible. There is no path to energy dominance in the next five years without renewables.

Let’s say you want to generate additional electricity for more data centers just through natural gas today. Even if you have an abundance of gas, as America does, you need more giant turbines to convert the gas to electricity. If you ask the major manufacturers of those turbines — GE Vernova, Siemens Energy and Mitsubishi Power — they will probably tell you that they will be very happy to deliver you one, but you will be lucky to have it installed by 2030. That is how long their backlogs are. And there is no telling what that turbine will cost with all of Trump’s new steel and aluminum tariffs.

By contrast, you can build and put online a new solar farm with battery storage in Texas in just 18 months.

Charging in Texas

“During the past quarter, Texas took the lead in clean power installations, adding an impressive 2,596 MW of new utility-scale solar, wind and storage capacity,” reads an October research report from Texas A&M, referring to megawatts of power. “This milestone marks the first time Texas has surpassed California to become the top solar state in the nation.’”

A Texas energy expert, Doug Lewin, posted last week that the Texas grid, known as ERCOT, recently reported that the state had added 10,000 megawatts of power in just the last year — most of it from supercheap solar power with battery storage, so energy can be distributed at night when the sun is not shining. As a result, Texas has seen a drop in brownouts on its grid because of more renewables combined with bigger storage batteries. Texas can still deploy solar-plus-batteries in the future, but now the electricity will cost consumers a lot more, thanks to the Trump bill.

If that higher monthly electricity bill bothers you, call Energy Secretary Chris Wright. He assuredly knows better, but like every other sycophant in Trump’s Cabinet, he seems to have just told the boss what he wanted to hear. As Wright must know, solar energy plus storage batteries made up 81% of the new electricity capacity added in the U.S. in 2024, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Now Trump’s idiotic bill will slash that amount.

The result for Americans? The research firm Energy Innovation, whose peer-reviewed energy modeling is widely respected, projects that Trump’s effort to diminish America’s renewable energy industry will cause wholesale electric power prices to increase roughly 50% by 2035, and that cumulative annual consumer energy costs will increase more than $16 billion by 2030. It also projects that about 830,000 renewable energy jobs will be lost or not created by 2030.

For all of these reasons, I am certain there are only two political parties in the world today cheering the passage of this bill: Trump’s Republican Party and the Chinese Communist Party — because nothing is more destined to make China great again than Trump’s “big, beautiful, America surrenders the future of electricity to Beijing” bill.

Thomas Friedman writes a column for the New York Times.