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Brian Windhorst, ESPN Senior Writer
Championship contenders making trades with one another is rare, and you don’t have to look too far back to understand why.
Just a year ago this week, the Milwaukee Bucks made a blockbuster trade 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 vital 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 fell into being each other’s best solution. It created an awkward and unexpected alliance that led to two contenders swapping two former All-NBA players — Karl-Anthony Towns and Julius Randle — just before the start of training camp, as spicy a move as you’re ever going to see in September.
The Knicks’ problems started at center, specifically their lack of a starting one. 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 helped the Knicks not lose leverage in these very trade talks. But internally New York is planning for Robinson to be out at least three more months. Will it 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, already departed in free agency, leaving New York dangerously thin — and short — up front.
Meanwhile, there had been no progress on contract extension talks over the summer with Randle, who was likely headed toward free agency in 2025. Randle, an all-star each of the past two seasons, had seen the franchise totally change around him over the last nine months, and he wasn’t sure where exactly he’d fit with a team built around Jalen Brunson and former Villanova teammates. Randle knew he would likely be playing a ton of rugged minutes out of position at center in what was shaping up to be a contract year.
There is 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’ve been Towns. Both with deep Jersey roots, Rose had bonded with Towns when he was a teen and, as his agent, had been there with him from his Kentucky days to being picked No. 1 overall to becoming a max contract player.
And now, Towns 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, was facing losing more than $100 million this season, sources said, because of a whopper of a luxury tax bill coming due with new contracts for Towns and Anthony Edwards. But it isn’t just about this year; the next few years are potentially monetarily punishing.
The lawyers for longtime owner Glen Taylor and the prospective ownership group led by Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez are set to start arbitration on Nov. 4 with a decision expected around the new year.
After the discovery process over the summer, Lore’s group has grown confident it will win and has gotten all of its finances in order, sources said. They plan to arrive at the proceeding with more than $900 million in escrow with the backing of billionaires Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. They will also show more than $200 million in working capital, sources said, demonstrating they can complete the purchase of the last 60% of the $1.5 billion transaction and then can fund potentially huge losses going forward.
But even if it is shown that Taylor broke the terms of the sales agreement last spring when he yanked the team off the market, the arbiter’s ruling isn’t 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 getting into the club, which is why he and Rodriguez have spent the last year trying to shore up support in dozens of meetings with other owners. It seems like there are lawsuits on the horizon no matter what.
Meanwhile, Wolves team president Tim Connelly has one of the best executive deals in all of sports. He’s got a lucrative $40 million contract to run the team and has negotiated a free out clause so that he can leave basically whenever he wants, largely because he has no idea who his boss is going to 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 finals in 2024 — just the second time in franchise history that the Timberwolves advanced beyond the first round of the playoffs — Minnesota’s situation grew more complicated when Edwards made the All-NBA team last season, earning him a $41 million bump in his contract. He’s worth every penny but no longer a bargain.
Towns is starting a four-year, $224 million extension signed back when he looked like the centerpiece franchise player in 2022. Not unlike Randle actually, Towns had seen his role change since that deal, as he’d become a willing supporter to Edwards.
Last year, Towns was immensely proud that he earned a spot on the All-Star team while handing over the reins to Edwards. Towns had previously sought assurances from Connelly that he wouldn’t be traded because he wanted to settle into that role. Connelly, who has built powerhouse teams in Denver and now Minnesota, said all the right things in their meetings but ultimately could not give that promise, sources said. In fairness, he couldn’t when looking at this landscape.
As this was all playing out, one of Connelly’s great moves, retaining backup center Naz Reid, turned into a masterstroke. 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 not Towns, but he’s 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 isn’t likely leaving his $46 million on the table, it was nearly impossible to envision the Wolves paying them both alongside Towns’ $53 million number in 2025-26 (Reid is set to make $15 million if he picks up his option).
You throw all of this together and you see how late on a Friday night in September, Towns was sent 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 potentially tens of millions more in the coming seasons while opening up more space for Reid and bolstering their bench with a great shooter.
When the smoke clears on all this it will become apparent just how hard this was to pull off. There are going to be multiple players sign-and-traded to make this work with the Charlotte Hornets facilitating, sources said.
The Knicks are expected to twist themselves into an impressive pretzel not to give up any more rotation players, sources said, and somehow get less than $200,000 below the second apron, which they are not permitted to breach, and pay multiple draft picks to grease it.
It’s not clear whether Randle will be pleased enough with the situation to extend his contract in Minnesota or if the Wolves can even afford him either. Or, frankly, who will get to make that decision on the team side.
It’s questionable whether the Knicks should have taken a couple months to watch their new Villanova-laden team to see 1) Randle’s ability playing center, 2) Mitchell’s progress from surgery, 3) What other centers might’ve become 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.