Karl-Anthony Towns trade grades: Knicks and Timberwolves both win in mutually beneficial blockbuster

The Karl-Anthony Towns trade between the New York Knicks and Minnesota Timberwolves is a rarity even in NBA terms. This league is certainly no stranger to surprising blockbuster trades, but surprising blockbuster trades the weekend before training camp begins involving two championship contenders hamstrung by a new collective bargaining agreement designed in part to kill deals like this? Yeah, that’s a new one.

Both the Knicks and Timberwolves entered Friday with 2024-25 championship ambitions. They are both leaving Friday with 2024-25 championship ambitions. Yet they’ve swapped reigning All-Stars and drastically remade their rosters mere days before training camps are set to begin. The closest analogue to this deal historically would probably be the Kyrie Irving-Isaiah Thomas swap of 2017, but even that deal came in August. Nobody has time to be shocked. The season unofficially begins on Monday.

So what are we to make of this thing? What motivated two potential Finals teams to shake up their rosters so drastically? And how did both teams do in the deal? Here are our grades for Friday’s shocker.

New York Knicks: B+

The Knicks had two major problems to solve within the next year. The short-term issue was the center position. Isaiah Hartenstein left in free agency. Mitchell Robinson is injured. Tom Thibodeau teams are incredibly reliant on size. New York was, at some point, going to need to take a swing on a center. The longer-term issue was Julius Randle’s contract. He is a three-time All-Star that makes more sense as a floor-raiser than a ceiling-raiser. He needs the ball in his hands to succeed. His jump shot is inconsistent. So is his defense. He’s never quite figured out the pick-and-roll dance with Jalen Brunson, though in fairness, the Knicks largely didn’t ask him too. He was, in a sense, a relic of a team they no longer had. He helped build the culture that Brunson inherited. But there was a pretty strong argument against his fit on a Brunson-centric team. He just wasn’t going to have the ball in his hands enough to justify the sort of contract his accolades suggested he would get.

The Knicks solved both of those problems in one fell swoop. Towns can play either power forward or center, a rarity among modern bigs and a very valuable one for a Knicks team that is also pretty heavily invested in Robinson. The Knicks have their short-term answer, and to get it, they ducked their long-term Randle problem. The Towns fit is much, much cleaner.

He’s not just a good shooter. He is, by almost any statistical measure, the greatest shooter ever to play the center position. Having that caliber of shooting out of a big man changes everything. The Knicks don’t have to worry about defenders ignoring Josh Hart nearly as much anymore. Do so at your own peril: giving him unfettered access to the glass with this spacing would be downright irresponsible. The difference between New York and Minnesota, though, is that the Knicks are far-better suited to taking advantage of the rest of his gifts than the Timberwolves. Towns is a stellar pick-and-roll finisher. He’s never really been able to show it because the Timberwolves didn’t have worthwhile guards early in his career, and by the time Anthony Edwards became a star, Towns was playing in poorly-spaced lineups next to Rudy Gobert. Jalen Brunson is going to love him.

Does Towns create defensive issues? Yes, but they’re workable when you have the right personnel. The Knicks emphatically have the right personnel. If they determine he needs to play next to a traditional rim-protector, they have Robinson. Truthfully, though, he likely starts as New York’s only big man. He’s very good in space, taking advantage of his athleticism to clog up passing lanes and stifle ball-handlers in more aggressive pick-and-roll defenses. Thibodeau tends to demand quite a bit out of his rim-protectors, but just think of the perimeter defenders on this roster. How often could anybody get past OG Anunoby, Mikal Bridges, Josh Hart and Deuce McBride? Anunoby can even defend centers when matchups dictate it. Towns couldn’t be joining a more perfect roster for his specific skill set.

Losing DiVincenzo stings. McBride can’t be a feast-or-famine reserve anymore. He’s the sixth man now, a role he more than earned a season ago. You’ll hear complaints about his contract. He’s certainly overpaid. A four-year super max would make most teams queasy, and as we’ll soon cover, it’s why Minnesota needed to trade him in the first place. But this is the flexibility Jalen Brunson’s discount buys you. The Knicks can afford this deal because Brunson, and eventually Mikal Bridges, will subsidize it. That’s a luxury no other team had.

The money is going to be tight for the Knicks. They lost meaningful depth and are now mostly out of tradable first-round capital. The big moves are done now. Either some version of this team is capable of winning it all or the Knicks aren’t going to do it. But the sheer magnitude of the talent upgrade here given the picks the Knicks already owed Brooklyn makes this a win. That win comes with risks attached, but they were risks the Knicks had to take given the potential reward.

Minnesota Timberwolves: B+

Nobody wanted to admit this, but Minnesota had to trade Karl-Anthony Towns. There’s an argument in favor of waiting a year. The Timberwolves just came seven wins shy of a championship. Typically that’s a team that runs it back. But Minnesota saw what happened when New Orleans tried to trade Brandon Ingram this summer. It has never been harder to trade a player who expects max money when he doesn’t consistently produce at a max level. Towns doesn’t just expect max money. He’s locked into it for four more years. There were plausible scenarios in which Minnesota tried to make a trade of this sort next summer and couldn’t. That is how restrictive to new CBA is. It was now or possibly never. The Timberwolves elected not to risk the “never.”

Minnesota is not New York. Edwards, Rudy Gobert and Jaden McDaniels are all earning market-rate. Naz Reid has a player option for the 2025-26 season that he will no doubt decline for a raise. Gobert might leave a bit of 2025-26 money on the table, but only if Minnesota gives him more long-term security. The Timberwolves are a second-apron team this season. That freezes their 2032 first-round pick. The last thing they want is to risk seeing it moved to the end of the first round through repeated apron penalties. Minnesota had to save money somewhere.

Maybe that somewhere wouldn’t have been Towns if he was a bit more reliable. But he had more playoff games below 20 points (nine) than above (seven). The Timberwolves lost the first three games of the Western Conference Finals by 13 total points. Towns shot 15-of-54 from the field and 3-of-22 on 3’s in those games. You can abide inconsistency from players at Reid’s price point. Not at the max. Gobert is too foundational to Minnesota’s defensive identity to move. Edwards is the face of the franchise and by far the team’s best offensive player. In the end, it was either Towns or the role players. Towns made more sense, especially with Reid duplicating so much of what he brought to the table. Moving him opened more doors.

In Randle, the Timberwolves are taking a flier on a cheaper alternative. The Timberwolves were paying $50 million for a $40 million player. Now they’re paying $30 million for $30 million player at the same position. The savings outweigh the talent dip even if the fit isn’t a slam dunk. Randle is the better creator among the two, and in Minnesota, that’s going to be valuable. The Timberwolves were dying for someone besides Edwards or Mike Conley to create shots last season. Randle will help in that respect, especially as they bring along rookies Rob Dillingham and Terrance Shannon. The shooting drop from Towns to Randle—especially on a Gobert-centric roster—is going to hurt. DiVincenzo will help in that respect, but he’s probably not going to close games unless Randle isn’t. That’s not the worst idea depending on matchups. Good luck guarding an Edwards-Gobert pick-and-roll with DiVincenzo, Conley and McDaniels around it.

The stakes of the Randle acquisition are low, though, because he has a player option for the 2025-26 season. At most, he’s under contract for two more years. If this doesn’t work, the Timberwolves can let him walk and regroup below the tax line. They can use his salary slot for a better fit through trade, and given all of the picks they currently owe San Antonio and Utah, that Pistons pick they got from the Knicks in this deal is going to be enormous on that front. 

They’re no longer at risk of getting locked into a roster they might not have wanted. If the Randle version works? Great. Re-sign him for less than it would’ve cost to keep Towns and find other ways to scrimp below the aprons. If it doesn’t, and you need to pivot? You’ve got a readymade young core here in Edwards, McDaniels, Reid and Dillingham. DiVincenzo fits with them because he fits with anyone. If the Timberwolves need to go younger at some point, they’re free to do that too.

If you believed that the Timberwolves were among the favorites to win the championship this season, this was a bad trade. It’s far likelier that the Timberwolves fell in the “they’d need two or three major breaks to win the championship” group that eight or nine teams currently occupy. They had no answer for Luka Doncic in the Western Conference Finals. Doncic isn’t going anywhere. Oklahoma City has improved dramatically since last spring. Beating Denver doesn’t mean they magically solved the Nuggets. They trailed by 20 points in Game 7 of that series. The Western Conference is too deep to lock yourself into a team that may or may not be ready to make a Finals run. Minnesota willingly sacrificed some of their 2025 equity to extend their run and make it a bit more versatile. It was a controversial move, but probably the right one. 

Towns isn’t ultimately what matters here. He was the third-best player on last year’s team. But Edwards has a chance to be the best player in the world, and he has years of runway ahead of him. If sacrificing Towns is what it takes to ensure Edwards has a long-term contender around him, then it was worthwhile.