Karl-Anthony Towns saves Knicks’ season with the best playoff moment of his career

It’s never easy with Karl-Anthony Towns, is it? Every breakthrough comes with a step back. He emerges as an All-Star in Minnesota, but the team falls apart in the wake of the Jimmy Butler debacle. He defends Nikola Jokić en route to the biggest playoff series win in Timberwolves history. He proceeds to shoot Minnesota out of the first three games of the Western Conference finals against the Dallas Mavericks. He scores 35 points in Game 1 for the Knicks in the Eastern Conference finals this season. He also gets switch-hunted mercilessly by Tyrese Haliburton on defense and benched for long stretches of Game 2.

This is the Towns experience in a nutshell. The good is so tantalizing that you suffer through a fair bit of bad. And, make no mistake, there was a lot of bad for the first three quarters of Game 3 on Sunday. They key number here was four: the number of turnovers, fouls and points he’d accumulated in the first 75% of the game. Turnovers and fouls have been unfortunate fixtures of his playoff history. He’s averaged nearly four fouls per game in his postseason career. He’s thankfully cut down on the turnovers, but in his first three spins on the playoff carousel, he racked up 57 of them in 16 games.

You live with those drawbacks in the hopes that he can score as he did in Game 1. When he does, despite the unfortunate ending of that defeat, it feels worth it. When he doesn’t, well, let’s just say things started to get to dark at the midway point of Sunday’s Game 3 win over the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference finals. The Knicks did, after all, start another center next to him in Game 3 in Mitchell Robinson. 

Robinson has been the plus-minus darling of the postseason, and a far easier fit within Tom Thibodeau’s preferred defense-first identity. Towns is making a super max salary. The Knicks are headed for several years of luxury tax bills and apron restrictions. Had the Pacers run them off of the floor in Game 3 as it looked like they would in the second quarter, questions about Towns’ place on this team, less than a year after his acquisition, were going to emerge.

Obviously, that’s not what happened. Brunson, who picked up four fouls in the first half, struggled through foul trouble. Thibodeau, perhaps accidentally thanks to the similar foul trouble endured by Deuce McBride, unearthed Delon Wright for some critical minutes. When McBride and Wright played together, New York’s defense suddenly clicked. That left the offense entirely in Towns’ hands. He delivered, quintupling his point total from the first three quarters with 20 in the final frame. A 10-point deficit turned into a six-point victory.

To call it the best playoff game of Towns’ career feels unfair. He was dreadful for three quarters of it, and again, despite the loss, Game 1 was four days ago, and his triumph over Jokić was more recent than his trade would suggest. It was certainly the best playoff moment of his career, though, and that feels somewhat fitting for a player whose defining trait might be his inconsistency.

These are the moments you trade for Towns to provide. You get him knowing that there are inevitably going to be games in which his defense makes him unplayable. You assume he’ll struggle with fouls and he’ll give the ball away and even when he doesn’t, his level of aggression comes and goes almost at random. It’s maddening. But when it’s right, it’s nirvana. And Sunday was the pinnacle.

This wasn’t a team-wide effort to slay the best player in the world, as the Denver series was a year ago. It wasn’t a wasted gem in defeat as Game 1 was, either. It was a season-saving, all-or-nothing masterpiece out of a player who badly needed one. It’s the sort of moment that justifies the decision to trade multiple key rotation players and a first-round pick to not only get him, but to pay out his enormous contract.

Hopefully, it’s a moment he can build on. We’ve seen every version of Towns in this series: the shooter, the aggressor, the pacifist, the frustration fouler, the playmaker, the turnover machine, it’s all in there. If Towns was the sort of player who could channel the good and block out the bad reliably, frankly, he’d probably still be playing for Minnesota right now. The Knicks have him in part because of the roulette wheel he spins on seemingly a quarter-by-quarter basis.

But it’s moments like this that justify the misses. The Knicks were dead in the water. Their season was over. The Pacers were heading to the NBA Finals… until they weren’t. There’s a lot of basketball left to be played here. The Knicks haven’t even reclaimed home-court advantage yet. But they’ll live to fight another day because of what Towns did in the fourth quarter on Sunday, and if all of those turnovers and fouls and bad defensive possessions on Haliburton are the price the Knicks have to pay to get that, well, at least on Sunday, it was worth it.