Driven by the loss of his mentor, Naz Reid made the fight against cancer personal

In the days leading up to a long-awaited meeting with 7-year-old Cayden Addison, Minnesota Timberwolves star Naz Reid wants to get one question answered.

Can I lift him?

Reid is 6 foot 9 and 240 pounds. The top of Cayden’s head barely reaches past Reid’s waist, so the question isn’t of physics. The issue is that Cayden’s little body has been through more in the last four years than most go through in a lifetime.

A rare form of cancer puts Cayden in the hospital for stays that last longer than a month, often pummeling him with horrible pain in his joints and extremities, which makes it difficult for him to walk at times.

So Reid and the Timberwolves want to know if Cayden can physically handle Reid picking him up when the two meet on the team’s practice court in Minneapolis and get to know each other. They had been paired together as part of a campaign to raise awareness for the importance of registering as a stem cell donor, which they hope will help Cayden find a bone marrow donor to finally win an endless fight with leukemia.

Yes, Reid is told. Cayden is feeling good and spry after flying from his home in Virginia to the Twin Cities with his family to meet this famous NBA player who has a burning desire to help him. So after Cayden’s first few shots on the 10-foot basket fall short during their visit, Reid grabs him by the waist and hoists him into the air to make things easier.

“Every kid dreams about that one, right?” Darryl Addison, Cayden’s father, said. “Dreams about an NBA player lifting you up. … It was just amazing watching him get lifted up there like that.”

Darryl and his wife, Courtney, are hoping Reid has another big assist up his sleeve.

Reid’s out-of-nowhere emergence from an undrafted rookie free agent to the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year last season mirrored the Timberwolves’ rise from the Western Conference gutter to the conference finals in late May. The six-year odyssey has endeared Reid, 25, to the Twin Cities in a way that few have matched. He is so popular that people are only half-joking when they suggest he could run for mayor of Minneapolis and win in a landslide.

When he enters a game at Target Center, usually midway through the first quarter, the fans roar louder than they do for any of the starters during pregame introductions. In the days after the team gave away a Naz Reid beach towel at a game, they were going for $100 on eBay. During the playoffs, a tattoo parlor had a promotion to ink “Naz Reid” on to fans for $25. The artists worked around the clock on hundreds of people.