Who really won the Karl-Anthony Towns trade? Reaching a verdict with Knicks and Wolves in conference finals

Here’s a fun fact: All four NBA conference finals teams this year are here because of win-win trades they’ve made with one another. The first came nearly a decade ago. In 2017, the Indiana Pacers traded Paul George to the Oklahoma City Thunder for Victor Oladipo and Domantas Sabonis. 

We know how that went for both sides. Two years later, the Thunder swapped George for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and a mountain of first-round picks. Three years after that, the Pacers traded Sabonis for Tyrese Haliburton. This is the very definition of a win-win deal. In the end, it effectively created two contenders. They both got their best player as a result of that one trade. 

However, if you were asked to pick a winner of the trade, you wouldn’t hesitate. It’s Oklahoma City. Haliburton is an All-Star, but Gilgeous-Alexander will likely be named MVP on Wednesday night. One of those draft picks turned into Jalen Williams, and the rest are the funding mechanism for their dynasty plans, a source of cheap labor to replace the expensive role players they’ll inevitably lose over time. The deal is therefore less of a “win-win” then it is a “win-WIN.” Both teams benefitted. One, significantly more so. That’s how it usually plays out. Not every trade has a loser. But someone makes out better among the winners.

Which brings us to the second win-win deal responsible for this year’s conference finals. In September, the New York Knicks traded Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo for Karl-Anthony Towns. This trade wasn’t quite as central to the identity of either team as the George trade has been for the Thunder and Pacers. Unlike Indiana and Oklahoma City, New York and Minnesota already had their best players in place when they made it, but that made the deal much more surprising. The Timberwolves were already a Western Conference finals team. The Knicks likely would have gotten there were it not for injuries last season. These are not the sort of teams that tend to make seismic trades. But they did, and thus far, both sides are pleased with the results.

We might have a clear winner one month from now. If either side wins the 2025 championship as a direct result of this deal, well, they’re the caps-lock winner. But where’s the fun in waiting for an objective answer? For now, the Knicks and Timberwolves have advanced to the same place, which is roughly where they landed a year ago. So, in the interest of planting a flag, let’s pick a winner here and now:

The case for the Knicks

In the simplest of terms, the Knicks needed the trade more than the Timberwolves did. Minnesota theoretically could have run last year’s roster back. The Knicks didn’t have that luxury. The limitations imposed by Early Bird Rights made it functionally impossible for them to re-sign former starting center Isaiah Hartenstein. Their other center, Mitchell Robinson, missed most of the year due to injury. With Precious Achiuwa injured as well, the Knicks literally did not have a rotation-caliber NBA center on their roster.

Towns obviously gave them one, but he did so in a way few other centers could. New York survived offensively with Hartenstein and Robinson because they were an elite offensive rebounding team. Inserting a normal center into their lineup would have cost them on the glass without presenting some alternative method of point generation. An offense featuring Josh Hart’s limitations as a shooter as well as a traditional big man would have struggled. 

Towns, arguably the greatest shooting big man of all time, was uniquely qualified to mitigate the issues Hart’s shooting creating. The Knicks didn’t just have to get a center. They had to get one of a very small number of centers in all of basketball that were specifically qualified to make this team work. Minnesota gave them one, and the Knicks ranked fifth in offense this season.

That carries us directly into our next point: Towns was far and away the best player in this trade during the regular season. In fact, by some metrics, he was essentially as valuable as Randle and DiVincenzo combined. He produced 3.5 VORP this season, whereas Randle and DiVincenzo produced 3.8 combined. When you factor in the production of the bench players that New York got to replace the DiVincenzo minutes (minimal, but not nothing), the Knicks likely generated more regular-season value out of the trade than the Timberwolves did.

That might not seem especially significant right now, but remember, last year’s Timberwolves won seven more games than this year’s version did. There was no universe in which Minnesota was going to gain home-court advantage over the 68-win Thunder, but those seven wins could prove pretty significant if the Timberwolves do manage to reach the NBA Finals. They won 49 games this season. The Pacers won 50. The Knicks won 51. The regular-season decline this trade created could cost them home-court advantage in the Finals.

The Knicks are also slightly better-positioned to benefit from the trade over multiple seasons. As we’ll soon cover, Minnesota’s motivation to make the trade was partially financial, yet there is still going to be a delayed cost here. Randle, Naz Reid and Nickeil Alexander-Walker are all slated for free agency this offseason. If Minnesota is going to duck the second apron and avoid years of hefty tax payments, they’re probably either going to lose one of those three players or have to dump someone else out of their rotation (with Mike Conley, just by virtue of his age, being the most likely candidate). Minnesota may have gotten two players for one here, but they’re almost certain to lose a second important player one year after the deal as a result of it. 

Ironically, Randle’s stellar postseason has made things a bit harder on Minnesota in that respect. He’s going to be more expensive. That’s money that now can’t go to everyone else. Keeping this team even partially together was always going to be expensive, but now, with new owners coming in, Minnesota’s budget is going to be stretched even further than expected.

Now, the Knicks are expensive as well, but they have advantages that Minnesota does not. Jalen Brunson intentionally took a sub-max extension to help New York’s team-building efforts, and Mikal Bridges may do the same this offseason. New York ducked the second apron this season and is poised to do so again next year. If you assume the Knicks are comfortable spending two years above the second apron, which is the maximum amount of time you can spend there without having a first-round pick fall to the bottom of the round, then they are positioned to at least keep their starting five together for four total seasons. It’s going to be expensive, but the Knicks, by virtue of their market, have access to revenue that the Timberwolves do not. They are better-positioned to stomach enormous tax bills.

Typically, the team getting the best player has an advantage in most trades. The Knicks did so here, and the cost was not prohibitively expensive. As good as DiVincenzo was for them, he was set to come off of their bench this season. They gave up only a single first-round pick, and it wasn’t one of their own. In context, a mid-first round pick and a high-end reserve seems a small price to pay for a meaningful and necessary front-court upgrade. That makes them the winner of this trade.

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The case for the Timberwolves

Towns was better in the regular season. Randle has been far better in the playoffs. Most of Towns’ playoff quirks have traveled east with him this year. He’s averaging 4.4 fouls per game in the playoffs. For the most part, he’s stopped making 3s again this year as he does in most postseasons, though a hand injury might be the culprit this time around. His defense was a problem against Boston, but it didn’t kill the Knicks because the Celtics missed their 3s. The Pacers are going to make him defend in space and change directions frequently. That’s a scary proposition. Minnesota and Oklahoma City are both equipped to attack him as a rim-protector in the Finals. He’s remained productive despite all of this, but he’s certainly playing worse than he did from October through April.

Randle, on the other hand, is playing a good deal better. His scoring is up almost six points per game, and he’s shooting 52.2% from the floor and 39.3% from 3-point range. This isn’t a hot shooting blip, though. He’s still getting to the line despite the league allowing increased defensive physicality. His assist-to-turnover ratio is nearly two-to-one. Randle is scoring, yes, but he’s really just playing good offense, making the right decisions and generating good shots for his team whether he’s the one taking them or not.

While Towns’ value as a shooter was immense, it was also downplayed on this roster by playing him at power forward. Randle is an inferior shooter, but he’s fine for his position, and DiVincenzo obviously injects plenty of space into whatever offense he plays for, so Minnesota has largely been able to recreate Towns’ shooting in the aggregate. That, in turn, has allowed them to benefit from the extra playmaking Randle brings to the table.

When Towns played without Edwards last season, the Timberwolves were a 20th percentile team in terms of offensive efficiency, according to Cleaning the Glass. It doesn’t matter how good you are at making shots if you can’t create them. When Randle has played without Edwards this season, though, the Timberwolves have been a 72nd percentile offensive team. They actually have a qualified offensive focal point for the Edwards bench minutes, and with Conley starting to age, just having another high-level positional passer on the team makes an enormous difference. Edwards is really only now starting to learn how to leverage his dynamic scoring into shots for teammates. His creation burden would have been too great without Randle on the team this season.

Don’t discount DiVincenzo’s contributions here either. The Timberwolves badly needed a movement shooter here even with Towns in place. Minnesota’s defense relies on one total non-shooter in Rudy Gobert and another inconsistent shooter in Jaden McDaniels. The Timberwolves had players that could knock down easy, open looks, but they had no one who drew defensive eyes off of the ball. That makes McDaniels a more valuable cutter and Gobert a more valuable rebounder and screener.

Minnesota even got a first-round pick out of this arrangement, and a pretty good one at that. The Timberwolves pick at No. 17 in June thanks to a Pistons pick the Knicks acquired years ago. That gives them access to four years of cheap labor at a draft slot they likely won’t have access to again during Edwards’ prime.

It also gives them a trade chip, which takes us to the finances of this deal. The Timberwolves made this trade almost entirely because of the supermax contract Towns is currently playing on. The Knicks could afford it because of Brunson’s discount. The Timberwolves were afraid that they couldn’t, and perhaps more distressingly, might get stuck with an untradeable albatross at a point in league history in which saving money has never been harder. They viewed the Towns trade at their last chance at preserving some measure of flexibility around a 23-year-old Edwards.

That’s the benefit of this precarious financial situation the Timberwolves still find themselves in. Yes, they are probably going to lose someone this summer. But they’ll keep the bulk of their team, and with it, the maneuverability to improve when it presents itself. If the Towns version of the Timberwolves wasn’t good enough, there might not have been anything Minnesota could have done about that. They might have been stuck with a team good enough to make the deeper rounds of the playoffs but weak enough to get slaughtered by Oklahoma City once they got there. That’s still a risk. The Thunder are far more talented than them, and that materialized in Game 1 of the Western Conference finals Tuesday. But now at least they have a chance to address that. The Knicks, on the other hand, may have some security with their current group, but improving upon it is going to be extremely difficult.

The verdict

While the victory is by no means decisive, I suspect the Knicks are going to wind up as the ultimate winner of this deal. That doesn’t make Minnesota a loser, but I’m somewhat dubious of the run Randle is on right now. Remember, before Randle returned from an injury in March, the Timberwolves were 32-29, he hadn’t started making his jumpers yet and it looks as though they might need to fund a way to dump his player option for next season just to retain Reid and Alexander-Walker.

He’s obviously turned things around quite a bit since then, but I’m not convinced any of this means the Timberwolves have a stable contender. Their first-round win came against a Lakers team with no centers. It stands to reason that a physical scorer like Randle would benefit from that lack of rim-protection. Their second-round win came against a Golden State team missing Stephen Curry. The win still counts. It just shouldn’t factor into our long-term projection of the team. If the Timberwolves had played the Nuggets or Clippers in the first round, which was a very real possibility, they might have lost in the first round and this conversation would sound pretty different. The West after Oklahoma City was extremely tight this year. The Timberwolves were somewhere in the middle of that pack and road a favorable bracket to the final four. The Thunder series will show us how close they really are. I suspect the answer is “not very,” at least based on Game 1.

Does that necessarily mean that the Knicks are closer? No, but remember, they don’t need to be. They’re in a wide-open Eastern Conference right now. The bar is lower, especially now that Jayson Tatum is expected to miss next season. If this two teams are of the same quality moving forward, you’d expect the Knicks to experience more success through weaker competition. That might sound unfair, but that’s life in the NBA. Once you get this far, all it takes is a tweaked ankle or a poorly timed case of the flu to swing a championship. The Knicks are in a better position to benefit from possible good luck than the Wolves are. As of Wednesday morning, the Knicks have much better odds to reach the NBA Finals than the Wolves (-165 to +470 on Caesars Sportsbook).

For what it’s worth, though, what the Knicks did against the Celtics is more impressive than anything Minnesota has done thus far this postseason. Even if it took shooting variance and massive comebacks, they beat a 61-win defending champion three times out of four with Tatum available. There will need to be adjustments on the fringes. The Knicks are not remotely deep enough when you factor in how healthy they’ve been all season outside of Robinson’s absence. But they’ve generally built a core that makes sense together. They can be sustainably competitive with the team they have.

What happens to Minnesota if they give Randle a long-term contract and he reverts to old habits? Or if he just declines a bit with age, but Reid has left in free agency, so the Timberwolves are forced to lean on him more than they’d like? Towns is just a bit less vulnerable to things going wrong. If the Knicks ever needed to move him to power forward, they could do so. The Timberwolves can’t slide Randle to center, and as Gobert gets older, that lost flexibility is going to matter. Towns can stave off aging a bit longer thanks to his shooting. If Randle loses his physical edge, he loses quite a bit more value.

Last year, Minnesota was somewhat decisively better than New York. This year, New York was a hair better than Minnesota. It exists in a more favorable conference and got the better player in the deal. With all of that in mind, this trade is likely to age a bit better for the Knicks than it will for the Timberwolves. That doesn’t mean it can’t be a win for Minnesota. It’s entirely possible that it is, and that escaping Towns’ deal now is what ultimately allows them to put the right roster around Edwards down the line. For now, though, the edge belongs to Towns and the Knicks.