Championship contenders making trades with each other is rare, and you don’t have to look too far to understand why.
Just one year ago this week, the Milwaukee Bucks made a blockbuster move with the Portland Trail Blazers to acquire Damian Lillard, but that inadvertently led to Jrue Holiday landing with the Boston Celtics. Holiday proved to be the crucial last piece for Boston’s quest to build a championship team within Milwaukee’s own conference.
But the New York Knicks and Minnesota Timberwolves each had a unique set of problems, and they became each other’s best solution. It created an awkward and unexpected alliance that led to two contenders trading two former All-NBA players — Karl-Anthony Towns and Julius Randle — just before the start of training camp, as spicy a move as you’ll ever see. in September.
The Knicks’ problems started at center, specifically their lack of a starter. New York has built a wall around the extent of starter Mitchell Robinson’s foot problems — the Leon Rose administration is good at keeping secrets, which has helped the Knicks not lose leverage in these trade talks. But internally New York plans for Robinson to be out for at least three more months. Will there be more? Hopefully not, but no one knows for sure. Isaiah Hartenstein, who served as Robinson’s backup the past two seasons and started 49 games in his absence last season, has already left in free agency, leaving New York dangerously thin — and short — up front.
Meanwhile, over the summer there was no progress on contract extension negotiations with Randle, who is likely headed for free agency in 2025. Randle, an All-Star each of the past two seasons, has seen the franchise completely change around him over time. last nine months, and he wasn’t sure where exactly he would fit in with a team built around Jalen Brunson and former Villanova teammates. Randle knew he would likely play a lot of raw minutes out of position at center in what was shaping up to be a contract year.
There’s also this: If there was one player Rose coveted more than Brunson, a de facto member of his family, when he was hired as Knicks president in 2020, it might have been Towns. Both with deep roots in Jersey, Rose linked up with Towns when he was a teenager and, as his agent, was there with him from his Kentucky days to being selected No. 1 overall to becoming a max contract player.
And now, Cities was more available than ever. The Wolves are trying to win a championship in the midst of a financial and ownership crisis.
Minnesota, a franchise that has generally operated frugally for decades, faced losing more than $100 million this season, sources said, because of a large luxury tax bill that came with new contracts for Towns and Anthony Edwards. But it’s not just about this year; the next few years are potentially punishing.
The lawyers for longtime owner Glen Taylor and the prospective ownership group led by Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez are set to begin arbitration on Nov. 4 with a decision expected around the new year.
After the discovery process over the summer, Lore’s group grew confident it would win and got all its finances in order, sources said. They plan to arrive at the proceeding with more than $900 million in collateral with the support of billionaires Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, and former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. They will also show more than $200 million in working capital, sources said, demonstrating that they can complete the purchase of the last 60% of the $1.5 billion transaction and then can finance potentially huge losses going forward.
But even if it is shown that Taylor broke the terms of the sales agreement last spring when he took the team off the market, the arbitrator’s ruling is not the last word. The other 29 governors will vote on the sale. If Taylor no longer wants to sell, will his partners of the last four decades go against him? Lore could win in court but lose going into the club, which is why he and Rodriguez have spent the last year trying to drum up support in dozens of meetings with other owners. Looks like there are lawsuits on the horizon no matter what.
Meanwhile, Wolves team chairman Tim Connelly has one of the best management deals in all of sport. He has a lucrative $40 million contract to manage the team and negotiated a release clause so he can leave basically whenever he wants, mostly because he has no idea who his boss will be. He could end up being one of the most coveted free agents in the summer of 2025.
And while Connelly built a roster that reached the conference playoffs in 2024 — only the second time in franchise history that the Timberwolves advanced past the first round of the playoffs — Minnesota’s situation got more complicated when Edwards made the All -NBA team last season. , earning him a $41 million bump in his contract. He is worth every penny but no longer a bargain.
Towns is entering a four-year, $224 million extension signed back when he looked like the top franchise player in 2022. Not unlike Randle actually, Towns has seen his role change since that deal, as he’s become a willing backer to Edwards.
Last year, Towns was extremely proud to have earned a spot on the All-Star team while handing the reins to Edwards. Towns had previously sought assurances from Connelly that he would not be traded as he wanted to settle into that role. Connelly, who has built powerhouse teams in Denver and now Minnesota, said all the right things in his meetings but ultimately couldn’t deliver on that promise, sources said. To be honest, he couldn’t look at this scenery.
As this all played out, one of Connelly’s great moves, retaining backup center Naz Reid, became a master stroke. Reid developed into the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year, averaging 13.5 points per game and shooting 41.4% from 3-point range. Reid is no Towns, but he is an excellent long-range shooter who is very effective playing with defensive ace Rudy Gobert.
Gobert and Reid have player options for next season and, while Gobert is unlikely to leave his $46 million on the table, it was almost impossible to envision the Wolves paying them both along with Towns’ $53 million number in 2025-26 (Reid is set to make $15 million if he picks up his option).
You put all this together and you see how late on a Friday night in September, Towns was sent out for Randle and Donte DiVincenzo.
The Knicks get their franchise center — affordable thanks to Brunson, who is now inexplicably the team’s third-highest-paid player after leaving $113 million on the table in his extension over the summer — and the Wolves save eight figures this year and maybe dozens. of millions more in the coming seasons while opening up more space for Reid and bolstering his bench with a great shooter.
When the smoke clears on all of this, it will become clear how difficult this was to pull off. Sources said there will be several players signed and traded to make this happen with the Charlotte Hornets facilitating.
The Knicks are expected to twist themselves into an impressive pretzel to not give up more rotation players, sources said, and somehow get less than $200,000 under the second apron, which they are not allowed to break, and pay several draft picks to fatten it up. .
It’s not clear if Randle will be happy enough with the situation to extend his contract in Minnesota or if the Wolves can even afford him. Or, frankly, who will make that decision on the part of the team.
It is questionable whether the Knicks should take a few months to look at their new Villanova-laden team to see 1) Randle’s ability to play center, 2) Mitchell’s progress from surgery, 3) What other centers could be available on the market.
But it’s also not unreasonable to envision the Wolves and Knicks playing each other in the Finals next June. And that, after all this, is the bottom line.
