KAT Got Your Tongue

The Minnesota Timberwolves are facing serious financial peril. Could their loss be the Knicks' gain...or their undoing?

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🗣️ News & Notes ✍️

🏀 In a report prior to Game 4 of the Finals, Woj mentioned the Knicks, along with the Lakers, Clippers and Warriors, as “potential destinations” for Chris Paul if he is indeed bought out by the Suns and becomes an unrestricted free agent.

Like I wrote on Thursday when this topic first came up, I find a reunion to be unlikely for obvious reasons. Primarily, Paul makes his home in LA and would likely be able to keep a starting job with both the Lakers and - presuming they didn’t bring back Russell Westbrook, the man Paul was once traded for - the Clippers. The Lakers in particular would seem to make the most sense given CP3’s ties to LeBron James and previous success in OKC sharing a backcourt with Dennis Schroeder, who LA should be able to bring back.

In New York, Paul would be coming off the bench, but that isn’t to say he wouldn’t have a path to significant minutes. That said, there are really only two paths to that happening, and they both involve Immanuel Quickley getting traded. If IQ is moved for a future asset or he’s half of a 2-for-1 trade that also sends out another rotation Knick and brings back an upgrade, the backup point guard job would theoretically open up. This also presumes that New York doesn’t feel like Deuce McBride is ready for a larger role, which is no guarantee given the strides he made last season. Even with those strides though, if the Knicks fancy themselves a title contender next season, they’d likely see Paul as the better option, at least for the moment.

If the Point God was brought in to fill Quickley’s shoes, he’d walk into a role that saw IQ get 25.6 minutes off the bench last season and 38.6 minutes in the 21 games he ran with the starters. The final average of 28.9 minutes per game is right around what Paul should probably getting at this stage of his career, at the ripe young age of 38.

If he ends up at that minutes level next year and stays mostly healthy, CP3 would become just the sixth point guard in NBA history to play at least 1000 minutes and average at least 24 minutes a night:

All of these guys - arguably the three best traditional point guards of the last 30 years besides Paul - were still starters on their respective teams, which wouldn’t be the case here. One season not listed here, because he was technically the starting shooting guard alongside point guard Raymond Felton: Jason Kidd for the 2012-13 Knicks.

Kidd was a massive part of New York’s success that season, but memorably faulted down the stretch as his age finally caught up to him. Paul, notably, has missed time in two of the last three postseasons, and while he played every playoff game in 2022, he was noticeably hampered and ineffective in the latter half of Phoenix’s lost series to Dallas. If the Knicks are really thinking big picture and envisioning a deep run into May and even June, would bringing on a 38-year-old point guard really be the best option? That remains to be seen. Paul is also smart enough to know that if he does manage to stay healthy into the spring, he probably can’t get many too many minutes in the playoffs alongside Brunson, who is another small guard that playoff offenses will try to target.

So while its certainly not impossible to envision Paul getting bought out and coming to the Big Apple, I’d still consider it far more unlikely than not.

🏀 Speaking of Quickley and the Suns, Jake Fischer dropped a report on Friday regarding the dominoes likely to fall if Chris Paul and Phoenix part ways, one of which will be their search for a replacement. About Quickley, Fischer notes that they hold the 6th Man of the Year runner up “in high regard,” as they have ever since the 2020 NBA Draft.

The article also mentions several other possible options, so it’s not like the Suns have their eye on Quickley and no one else. Besides, there wouldn’t appear to be any avenue for the teams to engage in a straight up trade with the Knicks. Phoenix’s best (only?) trade asset is Deandre Ayton, and while there are ways to add salary to make an IQ/Mitch for Ayton swap work under the cap, the former No. 1 overall pick doesn’t seem like the sort of target the Knicks are likely to go after. Their centers comprise the single lowest usage position in the entire league, so unless one of Brunson, Randle or Barrett went out in the deal, spending over $100 million on a center over the next three seasons wouldn’t seem to be the wisest expenditure of assets, especially one that doesn’t stretch the floor.

The same usage issue rears its head when thinking about possible three-team trades as well…say, something where IQ and Mitch go to Phoenix, Ayton goes to Indiana one year after they inked him to a max offer sheet, and Myles Turnes and some draft equity gets sent to the Knicks. We could get real nuts, real fast and keep moving more and more pieces¹, but before you know it the Knicks would be turning over half of their roster without a star coming back in the trade.

So the Suns can probably keep dreaming where IQ is concerned.

🏀 Last but not least is this nugget from Eric Pincus in his latest piece from Bleacher Report:

“Other competing executives think Karl-Anthony Towns will be long gone ahead of the 2024-25 campaign. Some even believe Minnesota would jump at an opportunity in the next few weeks.”

On that note…

Minnesota Timberwolves Primer

So, funny story:

On Thursday afternoon, I started working on Friday’s newsletter and figured it would be a good time to cover the next team staring into the abyss of luxury tax hell, the Minnesota Timberwolves. My thought at the outset was that it would be a brief analysis, because even if the Wolves felt forced to part ways with a certain former Kentucky big man, that shouldn’t be a tree the Knicks look to bark up.

And then I started writing…and thinking…and writing some more…and, well, I ended up deciding to put this as Monday’s feature column. In short, the more I thought about it, the more I felt like there’s more to consider here than initially meets the eye. Sure enough, Pincus dropped his report on Friday, making this topic even more timely.

And on that note…

Current guaranteed salaries in 2024-25: $93.9 million worth of centers who didn’t make the All-Star team this year, baby! We’re halfway to the lead apron already.

Non-guaranteed contracts or team options likely to be picked up: The 26th pick in the 2022 draft, Wendell Moore, who is likely to have his third year option picked up this fall. That’s another $2.5 million.

Possible additional contracts in 2024-25: There are two questions here: does Anthony Edwards wind up with the supermax, and how far will the Wolves take negotiations with Jaden McDaniels?

The first questions depends entirely on whether Anthony makes All-NBA next season (he finished 11th in forward voting this year, receiving two votes for 2nd team and eight votes for 3rd team). If he makes it, he’ll be owed $42.2 million on the first year of his new supermax deal in 2024-25. If not, it’ll be the regular old max, giving him $35.2 million.

The second question is tougher because McDaniels came on very strong this season. He’s a massive wing who can switch onto anyone and barely missed making All-Defense at the ripe age of 22. He also nailed 40 percent of his threes this year and showed legit shot creation upside. It’s not insane to think he could play himself into the max next summer depending on how this year goes for him.

In his recent extension projection article for Spotrac, Keith Smith projected an average annual salary of $25 million. That feels like the floor to me.

Cap holds: We’re already at a minimum of $157 million if you’re keeping track, and the real fun hasn’t even begun. A year from now, Minnesota will also have significant cap holds on the books for Mike Conley, Kyle Anderson, Taurean Prince and Jaylen Nowell. The exact numbers for the holds are irrelevant; the point is that if the Wolves let these guys walk, they have no means to replace them, and all except Nowell are key rotation players (and even Nowell averaged 10 points in 19 minutes a night).

Additional notes: You thought we were done? Ha!

Nickeil Alexander-Walker turned into a vital rotation piece by the end of the season, and he’s about to enter restricted free agency. He has a $7 million qualifying offer.

That leaves Naz Reid, one of the best backup centers in basketball who will be an un-restricted free agent this summer but whose Bird rights Minnesota holds. He’s a skilled stretch big, and thus, will have a market.

Endgame? Here’s what won’t happen: the Wolves sitting tight and just running it all back, as it would also be outrageously expensive for them to keep this core together. Assuming modest salaries for Anderson, Prince, Nowell, NAW and Reid, that would be a payroll hovering around $200 million, and we haven’t even addressed the starting point guard spot. Speaking of which, Mike Conley will by 37 years old by the start of the 2024-25 season, so this team needs to find a long term answer at that position.

Maybe they try to trade into this year’s draft (because you’ll surely recall that they traded away all of their picks to Utah) and use one of their expiring vets to land a first rounder to select a point guard of the future, but that seems like more of a hope and a prayer than a plan. Ditto for thinking that shuffling the deck chairs by moving their vet role players for other vet role players will make them any better (or cheaper).

Edwards is their cornerstone and has face-of-the-league level talent. McDaniels is the sort of player 29 other teams would kill to have. Gobert is as immovable as the Eiffel Tower. They really only have one path out of financial hell, and its to try and turn KAT into 2-3 rotation players that would then allow them to move off some of their current vets for whatever they can get (maybe some decent seconds for Prince or Anderson, I’d guess).

Of those ancillary pieces, none really make sense for the Knicks. As we discussed yesterday with DiVincenzo, adding rotation role players only really makes sense in conjunction with a consolidation trade, and even if they did that, using the mid-level to sign Donte or whomever would be easier than trading for a guy like Prince, who is…fine, at best.

(BTW: I hear everyone who wants Naz Reid, but for as much as the Knicks need spacing, they already have 48 minutes worth of solid - and not cheap - center production. Assuming an Obi trade, inking Reid for an eight-figure annual contract to be the backup power forward doesn’t strike me as the optimal use of resources, and I doubt the front office sees it any differently.)

That just leaves the big kitten. A more talented offensive big man, you will not find. His Cleaning the Glass profile contains more bright orange than the New York City skyline at the end of last week:

The individual numbers translate to team success on offense as well. With Towns on the court, here’s where Minnesota’s offensive ratings would have ranked league-wide in the five seasons before this one: 1st, 6th, 2nd, 8th and 1st.

Read those numbers again. If you squint hard enough, you can actually see the genesis of the insanity that led to the Gobert trade If Towns is a walking top-five offense, and Gobert is a walking top-five defense, then putting them together makes us a genuine contender. Quick, take all our picks Danny!

Unfortunately for Minnesota, it didn’t quite work out that way. When Gobert was on the floor, the Wolves did actually have a defensive rating that would have ranked in the top five in basketball, but their offense ranked just 23rd. Part of that was due to KAT missing all but 29 games due to a calf strain, but the issues seemed to go deeper than that. According to Gleaning the Glass, in just over 1000 possessions when Towns played the four alongside Gobert, the Wolves generated just 107.5 points per 100 possessions - a figure that would have ranked dead last in the league.

But when Towns wasn’t playing with Gobert? In those 400+ minutes, Minnesota put up 120.1 points per 100 possessions - a fire-breathing number that would have been the highest in NBA history over all full season.

The evidence still seems pretty clear: with Karl-Anthony Towns at the five, defenses don’t stand a chance. No one knows that better than his former coach, Tom Thibodeau. This year, without a queen on the chessboard like Towns, Thibs resorted to every trick in the book to generate a top-five offense in New York. But all that trickery went up in smoke come playoff time, when it was basically Jalen Brunson and a cloud of dust.

Towns, of course, hasn’t exactly been a prime time player in the postseason, but he’s also always been one of the top two options. On a team like the Knicks, he’d theoretically slot third in the pecking order, behind Brunson and Julius Randle. For the price tag (don’t worry, we’re getting there), he’d be the overpaid third option in professional basketball, but if the question is whether he’d make New York one of the most dangerous offensive teams in basketball, the answer is undoubtedly yes.

There is an argument that a Knicks lineup with KAT, Brunson, Randle, Grimes and another shooter - let’s say DiVincenzo, for shits and giggles - would be as potent as any offense this side of the Rocky Mountains. It would also allow for easy staggering of New York’s top three, such that two could always be on the court together, and lessen the need for Thibs to extend his main guys so many minutes in the regular season.

From Minnesota’s perspective, a trade with the Knicks almost makes too much sense, if only because there may not many, if any, other serious suitors. How many other pseudo-contenders besides New York have multiple mid-tier or soon-to-be mid-tier salaries and a need for upgrade at center? Atlanta qualifies, but they can’t trade a pick until 2029 and the remaining two years and $46 million for Clint Capela won’t be easy to dump, let alone get value for. Dejounte Murray would also be a flight risk if he was included in that trade. Indiana, with Myles Turner going back to playing the four? Ehh. The Blazers could certainly get in the discussion, but they’d have a similar problem as Atlanta in trying to dump Jusuf Nurkic on a third team, and Lillard, Towns and Grant alone would take up nearly the entire salary cap in the 2025-26 season. Toronto has pieces, but they seem more inclined to strip things down.

If New York were so inclined, they could send two key players to Minnesota - a starter in RJ Barrett and a starter-in-waiting in Immanuel Quickley - plus the expiring contract of Evan Fournier, who gets to unite with fellow Frenchman Rudy Gobert. Minny sends KAT and the expiring minimum salary of Jordan McLaughlin to make the math work.

We’re left with five questions - four tangible and and one a bit more philosophical - that would dictate whether New York should entertain a trade. From least to most impactful on their thought process:

1. What to do with Mitch? Robinson’s salary declines in each of the next three seasons, to the point that it’ll be worth less than the midlevel exception by the time it’s an expiring deal. Someone out there will want him, but it’s unclear who that is and whether they’d be willing to give enough value to make the front office comfortable.

(I want to acknowledge that Towns could theoretically play the four in New York, which would of course involve moving on from Randle. Consider me unconvinced that this is the route the Knicks would go if Towns came on the market. The advantage he provides is at the center spot. Otherwise, I’d assume they just move forward with the devil they know.)

2. What about draft picks? Minnesota would ask for everything, and the Knicks would try to give nothing (or at least none of their own first rounders). Is there a compromise to be had? Because of Minny’s cap situation, they might be more amenable to taking on New York’s protected firsts as significant value drivers in the deal. The reason is that, for them, it’s less about getting a golden ticket (like Ainge wanted) and more about getting multiple pathways to restocking the coffers with cheap labor.

3. Could this team defend well enough to win? You would think no, and yet we might be on the verge of seeing a team that starts Nikola Jokic, Michael Porter Jr and Jamal Murray win a title. Even so, the Knicks would seemingly still be another trade away from bringing in a big wing who could sure up their perimeter defense. Would that trade involve Julius Randle? Or would they trust that a Randle/Towns pairing at the 4 & 5 could defend well enough come playoff time to survive four rounds? If you chuckled a the mere thought of this, you’re forgiven.

4. What’s the opportunity cost? I think the biggest fear of every Knicks fan this summer is that the front office will act like a recent college grad who just got his first real paycheck. The temptation will be there to spend every last cent in short order, especially when other teams are hamstrung from making big trades for one reason or another.

There’s an argument that among teams trying to win now, the Knicks have a better and deeper trove of assets than just about anyone. Allocating a healthy portion of those assets on Towns would be lunacy in the eyes of some observers, not only in what they would need to give up to get him, but in the $224 million he’s owed over the next four seasons. That’s an awful lot of money to spend on someone who might be the Chris Bosh or Kevin Love of this offense, especially with Brunson and Randle set to ink new deals for the 2025-26 season. Assuming maxes for both guys, that’s $150 million for your top three players alone two years from now.

But if you truly believe the move can lead you to a title, you swallow hard and do it, which leads us to the final question…

5. Can Towns really be a primary component of a championship core? The fact that I’m even able to ask this about a player who has put up KAT’s numbers speaks volumes about how underwhelming his impact has been at the NBA level.

Consider, only 13 times in NBA history has a player put up per-36 minute averages of 22 points, 8.0 boards, 3.5 assists and 5.0 attempted threes while hitting at least 36 percent from downtown. Towns has five of those seasons, and he is just 27 years old:

His ability to check quite literally every offensive box is why Towns ranked as the top choice of GM’s around the league when they were asked which NBA player they would start a franchise with - not once, but twice. He ranked ahead of guys like LeBron, KD and Giannis when those polls were taken six and seven years ago, respectively. That actually happened.

And now? Now, there’s an argument that Towns isn’t even worth what he’s getting paid. He’s no longer the face of his franchise, and is barely considered one of the five best centers in the NBA. His stock, while still relatively high, has plummeted.

Leading to the question that KAT’s former agent has to be asking himself this summer: Would trading for Towns be the ultimate buy-low opportunity, or the ultimate sucker’s bet? Or, put another way, will history repeat itself if they swing such a franchise-altering trade?

10 years ago, New York’s front office followed up its most successful season in more than a decade by trading for a tantalizing former No. 1 overall pick whose stock was at an all-time low. Andrea Bargnani never once showed anywhere close to the overall offensive game that Towns has, but it’s hard not to think back and wonder if that trade is a cautionary tale.

The acquisition of Bargnani, of course, was a bi-product of the backroom machinations of CAA. That Rose and Worldwide Wes now run the Knicks is one of the main reasons Towns has been connected to his hometown team ever since they took the job. If nothing else, one hopes that old loyalties are not a part of their decision-making process now.

We’ll see. If nothing else, for all his faults, making a play for Towns is not something that should be dismissed out of hand. Like every deal, it will likely come down to the cost - both opportunity and otherwise - and what other moves the Knicks can make to sure up the roster around a theoretical Brunson, Towns and maybe Randle-led core.

Either way, my advice would be to buckle up.

It’s gonna be a bumpy summer.

🏀

That’s it for today! If you enjoy this newsletter and like the Mets, don’t forget to subscribe to JB’s Metropolitan, or his hockey newsletter, Isles Fix. Also, a big thanks to our sponsor:

See y’all soon! #BlackLivesMatter

1. The insanity I came up with - which I am not suggesting that either I or the Knicks would do - would have IQ, Mitch and Buddy Hield going to Phoenix, Ayton and RJ Barrett heading to Indiana, and Turner, TJ McConnell and the No. 7 & No. 26 picks in the draft going to New York. The only way I see the Knicks even thinking about this is if they had a deal lined up for a star in which the other team is incredibly high on someone in the top half of the lottery, and New York needed to get into the top-seven to facilitate the deal. The Suns also make out like bandits here, so maybe there’d be a 2030 pick swap coming New York’s way as well.