Karl-Anthony Towns trade rumors are inevitable after the Timberwolves’ loss to the Mavericks, but are they realistic?

Karl-Anthony Towns was a vital part of perhaps the greatest victory in Minnesota Timberwolves history. Let’s be absolutely clear about this. Towns was Nikola Jokic’s primary defender as the Timberwolves stunned the defending champion Denver Nuggets to reach the 2024 Western Conference Finals. The idea that this roster was built to beat the Nuggets, in particular, depended as many Towns as Rudy Gobert and Anthony Edwards. The self-proclaimed greatest shooter in NBA history was an absolute necessity to keep the Timberwolves offense viable against some of the league’s biggest lineups. Minnesota’s season would have ended weeks ago without him.

Weeks feel like years right now because Karl-Anthony Towns was horrible in the Western Conference Finals. The Dallas Mavericks posed a number of intractable matchup problems for Minnesota, but Towns wasn’t supposed to be one of them. No, he was supposed to feast on the smaller PJ Washington and help Minnesota win the title against a Mavericks team that hadn’t really been tested yet in these playoffs. Instead, you watched the games. Towns shot 33 of 87 in the Western Conference Finals. Minnesota lost its minutes by 16 points. Naz Reid closed out the second match against him. He offered little defensively.

That’s largely what Towns has been throughout his career, a star as talented as he is inconsistent. In the 2022 and 2023 playoffs, he scored 15 points or fewer in four of his 11 games, but 25 or more in five of the remaining seven games. He has more playoff games with four or more fouls (18) than three or fewer (14). Minnesota has lost minutes in 20 of its 32 playoff games. For most of NBA history, you just lived with it. Max level talents were so rare and valuable in their prime that you gritted your teeth at their inconsistencies and blindly paid for them at every opportunity.

This is no longer the NBA we live in. The 2023 CBA was designed to break down teams like the Timberwolves. As of this writing, Minnesota has about $193 million in salary committed to next season, a figure that jumped by about $7 million when Edwards earned All-NBA honors.

The Timberwolves currently only have 10 players under contract. Even if they filled their remaining positions at minimum salary rather than signing key free agents like Kyle Anderson and Monte Morris, their final payroll, before trades, would almost certainly be around $200 million. Such a payroll would also result in the payment of a luxury tax on the order of $70 million, depending on the final figures. All told, this would make the 2024-25 Timberwolves one of the most expensive teams in NBA history.

There has never been a worse time to have one of the most expensive teams in NBA history. The toughest Second Apron restrictions come into effect when the calendar turns to July. Teams above that projected $189 million line will no longer have access to the mid-tier taxpayer exception. They will not be able to consolidate salaries across trades, nor will they be able to recover a cent more from transactions than what they send. Their draft picks are frozen at the end of the first round, and starting with the 2025-2026 season, their tax bills get much bigger.

Maybe Joe Lacob or Steve Ballmer would be comfortable in this reality. It’s hard to believe Minnesota will own it. We don’t even know who this team will be after the dust settles. Current owner Glen Taylor has only paid the luxury tax once since the league adopted its more punitive format in 2011, and even then, during the 2019-20 season, Minnesota was at barely over the line.

Possible newcomers Alex Rodriguez and Marc Lore are even scarier. A report from ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski claimed that documents shared by Lore and Rodriguez with the NBA and the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm reportedly involved in purchasing the team, outlined a budget for next season including a projected payroll of $171. million dollars, which is $1 million short of the planned luxury tax threshold of $172 million. That would mean a payroll reduction of about $30 million.

There’s no $30 million in superfluous salary here. Frankly, the majority of Minnesota players are underpaid. If the Timberwolves made Jaden McDaniels ($22.5 million salary for next season), Naz Reid ($14 million) or Mike Conley ($10 million) available in the dumps, they would have a line of suitors around the block. All three are totally essential to Minnesota’s style of play and irreplaceable at their current prices. Gobert is the defensive player of the year on a team designed to win defensively. He’s not going anywhere. Edwards is the face of the franchise.

Only Towns remains. It is Minnesota’s only path to savings, but also to meaningful change. Is change, whatever the cost, a necessity? Well, that’s a matter of debate.

The Timberwolves defeated the defending champion Nuggets. This would seem to indicate that they have a championship caliber team. The problem is that several of them can exist at once. Dallas has one too, and it performed pretty well against Minnesota’s. The Timberwolves could have overcome their weaknesses against the Mavericks with Towns playing a little closer to his best. Instead, its struggles may have cost Minnesota its best chance to win it all.

Perhaps Towns could be dealt for pieces that would reconfigure the matchup equation in a favorable way against Dallas. Turn him into a more Lu Dort-like wing defender, strong enough to hold his own against Doncic and maybe a rematch will play out differently. Of course, take that route and the size that helped beat Denver suddenly disappears and you’ve effectively solved one problem by creating another. Or maybe he could be traded for a younger point guard, who scores first. The Timberwolves ranked 17th on offense despite paying Towns, an offensive big man first, the most. It’s worth wondering how necessary he really is in most matchups when Reid does similar things for a third of the price.

Of course, if the Timberwolves think about it, so does the rest of the league. Consider some of the players populating the trade market this offseason. Trae Young, Brandon Ingram and Zach LaVine – obvious old-world max contracts who are struggling to generate substantial interest right now due to their contracts. Edwards justifies a max offensively. Gobert does it defensively. It’s unclear where Towns made this postseason, and he has four years of money waiting for him. If Towns isn’t a max player, how many teams will want to pay him max money?

Part of what justified the risk of the high-cost Gobert trade two summers ago was the idea that if it didn’t work out, Young Towns would be able to get a similar set of assets back from them. This may no longer be the case. How many teams are a) interested in paying Cities four years of supermax money, b) have winning players to send back to Minnesota, and c) have those winning players under contracts that would save the Timberwolves money? ?

The obvious answer is none. Maybe you could stretch it a little. How bad do the Knicks want to improve Julius Randle? There’s a pretty simple scenario here in which Minnesota trades Towns for Randle and Bojan Bogdanovic along with some draft capital with the idea that they can just pay for a $30 million power forward next season instead a whopping $50 million. Towns, both a CAA client and Kentucky alumnus, has long been in the orbit of New York’s power brokers. It’s hard to believe the Knicks wouldn’t have bigger trade ambitions, and Towns’ first round with Tom Thibodeau didn’t end well.

Oklahoma City’s desire to play five-out offense makes Towns an interesting choice. A literal Dort-centered trade might even make sense for basketball here, as the Thunder both have the cap space to absorb a sizable contract and Cason Wallace is waiting in the wings to replace him. But the Thunder have their own long-term financial issues to consider. They have a two-year window before Chet Holmgren and Jalen Williams make maximum money. It’s hard to imagine paying both Towns and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander at the same time.

Miami tends to be open-minded about stars, but the Towns-Jimmy Butler duo hasn’t worked out in Minnesota, and even if Butler is treated as rumored, Towns and Bam Adebayo overlap. There are tempting reasons for New Orleans basketball to trade Ingram for Towns, but the Pelicans, like the Timberwolves, are trying to save money rather than spend it. Maybe one of the asset-rich underclass teams trying to make a jump goes for talent? Houston has been hunting big game lately. Utah still is. Maybe there’s a mystery front office like Charlotte’s or Detroit’s that faces enough ownership pressure to simply gamble on talent.

But there is no comfort here. Minnesota’s problem is not unique. Half the league is freaking out over the contracts they gave out before this new CBA made them toxic. The sport is evolving, and no one really knows exactly how it is evolving. All we can say for certain is that winning a championship with a max player performing in the playoffs like Towns did against Dallas is functionally impossible.

Keeping players like these is about to become so expensive in terms of opportunity cost elsewhere on the roster that anyone making maximum money must have maximum production. Towns didn’t do it against Dallas. That’s why the Timberwolves aren’t preparing for the Finals right now, and if they don’t find a way to maximize it on the court or via a trade, they may never get another chance like this that they just wasted.