Karl-Anthony Towns/Julius Randle trade grades

It's all about the moolah, baby

I’m supposed to be on vacation.

I just wrote a textbook about every team in the NBA for my League Pass rankings and was looking forward to not typing about basketball for a bit. But now, dear subscriber, I must inflict more words on you about this bonkers Karl-Anthony Towns/Julius Randle/Donte DiVincenzo trade between the New York Knicks and the Minnesota Timberwolves.

Trades create so many ripples whose effects won’t be discernable for years; grading them in the immediate aftermath is a fool’s errand. I love it.

That said, this is one of the harder trades to grade that I can remember. You can make very compelling cases for and against the trade for both sides, which is pretty rare.

The details are still being finalized; the Knicks must figure out how to send out more salary. Charlotte is rumored to be the third team absorbing salary for draft compensation (presumably some second-rounders). It’s a good move for them, but one that doesn’t need much discussion.

The principal players are as follows:

Minnesota Timberwolves receive: Julius Randle, Donte DiVincenzo, a heavily protected Detroit first-round pick
New York Knicks receive: Karl-Anthony Towns, Karl-Anthony Towns’ super-max contract

There’s a lot to unpack, but let’s start with the Timberwolves.

The fundamental reason that this trade exists is because the Minnesota Timberwolves were cataclysmically expensive and becoming more so. I don’t want to get into the details too much, but KAT was just starting a four-year super-max contract paying him 35% of the salary cap this season. He will be due a monster bill every year until 2027-28, which is a player option that he may or may not pick up depending on his health, quality of play, and other factors we can’t forecast this far out.

Randle is only under contract for this season with a player option in 2025-26, getting paid roughly $29 million (compared to KAT’s $49 million); if this year goes well, they can run it back or extend him, but if it doesn’t, they won’t be the hook after 2026 at the latest. DiVincenzo is on a fantastic long-term deal paying him just $11 million this season — an absolute bargain if he maintains anything close to his production last year.

Towns, as we’ll discuss in short order, is a good player with some great qualities. That is still a phenomenal amount of money for a player with a history of faltering playoff performances. Last summer, one of my Unlikely-But-Plausible predictions was that KAT or Gobert would be moved this summer, and it turns out that I was right even after the Wolves had the best season in their history (I wasn’t right about much else, so let me have this one)!

The Wolves have a relatively tight-fisted owner in Glen Taylor (currently in a major lawsuit against Alex Rodriguez and Marc Lore over who really owns the Wolves), but it doesn’t matter who the ownership was; this team was always going to be broken up at some point. I just assumed they’d give it one more go to try and build off last year’s success, but they decided that trading that contract for pretty good talent back (and a quasi-first-round pick) was a deal they couldn’t pass up.

The on-court impacts are immense, however, for good and ill.

First, Towns had a strong season last year. He is legitimately one of the best shooting big men ever, and he can do it in all kinds of ways: step-backs, spotting up, you name it. He’s at his best in arguably the most valuable area for big men to shoot from, hitting 44% from the top of the arc (which draws help defenders further from the paint than the corners). He was no worse than 37% from anywhere around the line, per this shot chart from Statmuse:

That’s a beautiful piece, right there.

But you know what else is pretty? Donte DiVincenzo’s shot chart:

It’s different in intriguing ways. DDV did most of his damage from the wings and corners as an off-ball shooting guard with the Knicks. I wrote earlier this summer about DiVincenzo’s unbelievably good shooting during the stretch run last year, but he’ll be used a little differently in Minnesota.

He’ll still do plenty of spotting up around Anthony Edwards and Rudy Gobert, don’t get me wrong, but point guard was a bit of a worry for the Wolves. Mike Conley is great, but Conley is also really, really old. Rob Dillingham, the Wolves’ rookie, might be great one day, but he’s really, really young, and expecting him to be a difference-maker in the playoffs this year is probably a bad bet. DiVincenzo isn’t a true point guard, but he’s more than capable of playing the position next to Edwards if he needs to since Edwards will be on the ball plenty. DDV fits perfectly next to Edwards or backing him up, and he should see plenty of minutes alongside either of the Wolves’ lead guards.

The Randle fit is more interesting. He shares some of the same strengths and weaknesses as KAT, but he’s a far worse shooter. He’s had seasons of passable three-point shooting, and volume certainly isn’t the problem — he’ll get them up with a quicker trigger finger than even KAT. But he shot 31% in last year’s injury-truncated season, and 2020-21 was the last and only time he’s ever shot better than 34% from range.

Randle is used to playing next to non-shooting centers from his time with New York, and he brings his own offensive strengths. He can be a very incisive passer when he wants to be, and he’s a good offensive rebounder. He’s a better ballhandler than Towns, although both players are quite turnover-prone.

When Randle has big games, he looks elite. He can physically overpower many power forwards, but he’s nimble enough to blow by centers. He’ll have nights with 25/12/6, and the Wolves will win by 30. You’ll start looking at their FanDuel odds to claim a championship.

But then he’ll have nights when he looks disengaged without the ball, when Anthony Edwards gets tired of driving into an overcrowded paint, and you’ll wonder if he should even be starting for this team.

Randle will start, of course, but there’s a world where he doesn’t close every game. The nice thing about trading one talented player and getting two back is that the Wolves now have depth and optionality (not to mention more, although not a lot, of financial flexibility in the future). If the Edwards-Gobert-Randle trio is too clunky offensively, Naz Reid will be there to replace either Randle or Gobert. If they want perimeter shooting, DiVincenzo will provide that in spades.

The Wolves roll deep now. Backup big man Reid was nearly as good a shooter as KAT last season, and if that maintains, they might not miss him as much as we think. Jaden McDaniels is one of the league’s premier lockdown artists on the wing, and Nickeil Alexander-Walker is a similar caliber of defensive player. Joe Ingles may see some time as a bench playmaker, too, even if he’s pretty darn close to cooked. Add in rookie Terrence Shannon Jr, an explosive rookie wing who looked ready to contribute something in Summer League, and the Wolves have so many interesting permutations.

They can go giant, big, medium, small, or tiny (a Conley-DDV-Edwards-McDaniels-Reid lineup fascinates me). They can shapeshift to a degree that almost no one in the league can match. Watching coach Chris Finch tinker with lineups will be a lot of fun.

The Pistons’ pick is a little squirrely. It’s top-13 protected this year (definitely not conveying, in other words), top-11 protected next year, and top-nine protected in 2027, after which it turns into a second-round pick. The odds of the Pistons getting to the upper part of the lottery by then aren’t zero, but certainly aren’t 100%. There’s a world where they get the 12th pick in the next few years, right in the middle of Edwards’ prime, but it might also evaporate into essentially nothing.

I don’t think the Wolves are better this season, as the best version of KAT is better than Randle and DDV. But they traded theoretical ceiling for on-court flexibility, which is extremely important in the playoffs. More importantly from their point of view, a Towns or Gobert trade felt inevitable, and I’m surprised they got as much back as they did. The market for max players who don’t quite perform like max players is bad now and getting worse; most teams that would want Towns literally can’t get him, thanks to apron-related team-building restrictions.

Minnesota Timberwolves grade: B-

For the Knicks, this changes everything.