Six deals on draft night were just the beginning of what it took to get <a href="https://www.archysport.com/2022/01/nba-minnesota-timberwolves-the-call-of-the-forest/" title="NBA: Minnesota Timberwolves, the call of the forest”>Karl-Anthony Towns to New York.
Get to Karl-Anthony Towns with $300 thousand to spare. For the New York Knicksthis was the mandate and the margin.
Towns and his new teammates from the Knicks They will face their old team, the Minnesota Timberwolveson Sunday (6 pm ET on ESPN/ESPN3) in what has become one of the most interesting games of the preseason. The machinations that decided which uniform Towns would wear are deeply nuanced and endlessly interesting.
The acquisition of Towns was a great move. What the Knicks did to make it really happen was a saga.
That’s where the $300k comes into play. That is the space that the Knicks below the unbreakable barrier known as “the second apron” once they complete their roster at the end of the preseason, league sources told ESPN (because they added salaries in trades to acquire Towns and Mikal Bridges, are not allowed past the second apron at any time this season). That’s about 0.2% of his $189 million payroll this season, by NBA contract standards, a rounded figure. But what a dance to get there.
“It’s been a great execution of a plan. “It’s been brewing for five years,” said the coach of the KnicksTom Thibodeau. “It’s about accumulating draft capital, analyzing opportunities and taking it step by step to figure out what can be done.”
So:
• In 2021, the Knicks They signed Jalen Brunson to a contract that declined over the first three seasons. Although he signed a new four-year, $156 million contract that will begin in 2025, Brunson’s contract decreased by $1.3 million from last season to this season.
• In 2022, the Knicks They signed Mitchell Robinson to a contract that declined over the four years of the deal. Robinson’s salary decreased by $1.3 million from last season to this season.
• In June, the Knicks declined to extend center Precious Achiuwa a $6.3 million qualifying offer, which would have made him a restricted free agent. Instead, they allowed him to enter unrestricted free agency. Then, a month later, they signed him to a $6 million contract to be their backup center. This saved them $300K in cap space over what it would have cost them if they had extended the qualifying offer and he had signed it.
• Los Knicks They started draft night with two first-round picks, No. 24 and No. 25. They then made six trades on draft night, eventually ending up with picks No. 25 and No. 34, plus a handful of others. second-round picks, most of them for future drafts.
• Their first-round pick, Pacome Dadiet, signed a contract for 80% of his previously allocated salary for the first year, which is allowed by the rules. Their second-round pick, Tyler Kolek, signed for $800,000 less than the salary assigned to the 24th pick. These moves saved the Knicks $1.3 million in cap space for this season.
• Los Knicks They signed and traded three players – Charlie Brown Jr., DaQuan Jeffries and Duane Washington Jr. – to the Charlotte Hornets to make the deal work under the rules that Minnesota and New York had to deal with. The Knicks They signed them to contracts totaling $6.8 million to make the trade viable. They then used the $7.2 million that NBA teams can send in trades per year and sent it to Charlotte, covering the cost of the players with the Hornets netting $400,000 plus three second-round picks. To the Knicks They were only allowed to sign-and-trade Jeffries because they had signed him to a contract for the rest of the season (after two 10-day contracts) on March 25. Washington and Brown finished last season with the Knicks with two-way deals, making them eligible to sign and trade.
Without each of these moves, the Knicks would not have been able to complete the trade for Towns. All together they made it possible. Some of them, like the first triple signing and trade transfer in history, were for Towns. Others, like Brunson’s and Robinson’s contract structures, were put in place just in case something like this was necessary.
The president of the KnicksLeon Rose, who was obsessed with acquiring Townsfollowed a similar path with a previous offseason obsession: landing Brunson in 2021. Brunson, a former client from his agent days as Towns, was a target of the Knicks for months and made a series of deals around that year’s draft to clear $30 million off their books to open cap space and sign Brunson outright.
The Dallas Mavericks, the former team of Brunsonwere sufficiently surprised to lose him without the possibility of matching the offer or redeeming him. They later filed tampering charges against the Knicks after seeing the symphony end with Brunson agreeing to terms at the very beginning of free agency (the Knicks They lost a second-round pick in the 2025 draft as a result of that tampering investigation.)
If that was a graduate-level office job, the maneuvers to get Townswho according to Rose could be his other cornerstone, were a thesis.
The practical details were largely done by the vice president of strategic planning for the KnicksBrock Aller, who has a long history of making complex, multi-step deals dating back to his days in the Cleveland Cavaliers front office. Aller handles much of the strategic movements of the Knicks and performs most complex business negotiations.
“Brock has been fantastic,” said Thibodeau, who previously led the Timberwolves’ front office. “And it’s not easy. It’s your immediate plan and also your future plan. You have to look at it almost three different ways. There’s the basketball point of view, what does it mean for what’s on the court? Then there’s the financial impact. Then there’s also the sanctions aspect that you have to look at as well. So before you make a decision, you have to do a lot of research. So they’ve done a great job.”
Towns knew that Rose was interested in signing him, but he didn’t think the Knicks could achieve it, but not after his salary increased by $13 million starting July 1 when his contract extension took effect ‘supermax’ signed in 2022. Or after the Knicks They triggered a series of trade restrictions once they made another massive deal, acquiring Mikal Bridges, in June.
“I was surprised,” Towns said. “Perhaps the word dumbfounded is more correct.”
The same thing happened to much of the rest of the NBA. But Rose, Aller and the rest of the team’s board Knicksincluding vice president Gersson Rosas, who helped finalize the deal with his former team, can’t do much more. The players are aware that the serious business is still in their hands.
“[Brock] “He does a great job on his part,” Brunson said. “We applaud him for that, and we just have to go out there and do our part on the court.”
