Analysis: Were the Timberwolves right to trade Karl-Anthony Towns?

MINNEAPOLIS - Shortly after Tim Connelly took over as Timberwolves president of basketball operations in May 2022, he made two major moves. He gave Karl-Anthony Towns, who was coming off an All-NBA season, a maximum four-year contract extension that paid him $49 million in the first year of the deal (which was last season) and can pay him $61 million in the final year in 2027-28.

Connelly then traded for Rudy Gobert, who was also on a max contract at the time.

Connelly's moves in his first six weeks on the job have set the table for everything that has come since in his tenure, especially after one large curveball came his way in April 2023.

During the Knicks' run to the NBA Finals with Towns this postseason, there have been plenty of Wolves fans happy for his success. At the same time, you can find people litigating the trade that sent Towns to New York in September 2024 all over social media. The internet's memory is short and doesn't always remember details well, so perhaps it is worth revisiting the reasons why the Wolves made the deal and what might have happened in the alternate universe in which the Wolves didn't trade Towns.

The Wolves made the Gobert trade with Utah before the NBA and the players association signed off on a new collective bargaining agreement in April 2023. That set up the "apron" system of punitive team-building restrictions and significant luxury-tax payments for teams that exceeded the dreaded second of these aprons.

With Anthony Edwards set to start making max contract money in the 2024-25 season, the Wolves were headed toward large luxury tax and roster-building obstacles if they chose to keep rostering Gobert, Towns and Edwards at those max-salary levels. (Gobert would eventually sign an extension that reduced his yearly salary.) So just before training camp opened in September 2024, the Wolves made a move that a lot of fans now wish they had not - they traded Towns to the Knicks for Julius Randle, Donte DiVincenzo and a first-round pick, which later became Joan Beringer.

The Wolves made the Towns trade with Edwards in mind. They believed that in order to keep reshaping and rebuilding the roster around Edwards, they needed to get out of the second apron sooner rather than later. Without the trade, the Wolves would have been stuck in roster-building hell while forking over large luxury tax bills. Around the NBA, no team is trying to stay in the second apron for multiple years.

That makes having two players on maximum contracts a difficult thing to manage.

The Knicks are in the NBA Finals now in part because Jalen Brunson, who would otherwise be a max contract player, is taking more than $100 million less over the life of his contract to help the team have depth. The San Antonio Spurs' young stars of Victor Wembanyama, Dylan Harper and Stephon Castle are all still on their rookie deals. The Oklahoma City Thunder won a title last season and advanced to the conference finals this season with only one max player (MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander) surrounded by players like Chet Holmgren and Jalen Williams on their rookie deals. The Thunder are about to experience life in the second apron when big extensions for Holmgren and Williams begin next season, but they are set up well to deal with the consequences thanks to their depth and trove of draft assets.

The Wolves didn't have the same luxury in 2024 after dealing a lot of their assets in the Gobert trade and a few more in their move to acquire Rob Dillingham in that year's draft. They did somewhat paint themselves into a corner, but they also made the Gobert trade before knowing how the CBA would make their roster building more challenging in future seasons.

The Wolves officially got Randle, DiVincenzo and Beringer in the Towns trade, but they might have had to say goodbye to some other popular players if they didn't make the move.

Naz Reid, who signed a five-year, $125 million deal last offseason, likely isn't on the team anymore if Towns is still here. What else would the Wolves have done to free up space under the second apron in order to keep Towns and Edwards together? Would Gobert have been gone as well? What about Jaden McDaniels?

It's easy to say the Wolves should have stood pat and kept Towns and everyone else from the 2023-24 team, but the reality is everyone's ballooning contracts (McDaniels and Edwards made a combined $49 million more in the 2024-25 season than they did the previous one) made that nearly impossible in the long term.

I spent the first part of this article basically defending the front office's thinking. This is where I think it has to take a few lumps.

The thing about trades is for as much as people want to say they are good or bad in the moment, it can take years for the true legacy of a deal to shake out. When the Wolves dealt Towns, Wembanyama was entering his second season, and you could see he was going to be a problem in the Western Conference before long.

Now the Wolves are staring down the barrel of a West that feels pretty hopeless with Wembanyama and the Spurs likely in the mix for the next decade-plus (not to mention the Thunder). The Wolves, meanwhile, might have ended up trading one of the few players who can pose problems for the superhuman Wembanyama - a big man like Towns who can shoot 3-pointers at a high clip, take Wembanyama off the dribble and run offense for his team.

That's not to say the Wolves won't close the gap on the Spurs in coming years (life can change pretty quickly in the NBA), but it certainly hurts to see Towns have the kind of success he's having against Wembanyama in the Finals while Gobert and Randle struggled against San Antonio in the second round. Even if the roster would look much different if Towns were still in Minnesota.

Also, credit to Towns for playing some of the best and smartest basketball of his career when a lot of people might not have thought he was capable of being a difference-maker deep in a playoff run. Credit to the Knicks for thinking he could be one. With Brunson's contract helping to provide flexibility, they made the kind of daring move that either causes teams to fall flat on their face or elevate their chances of winning a title, and it paid off. There's one adage that says you win a trade if you acquire the best player, and Towns was the best player in that trade.

There's probably a lot of you out there saying, "No, they shouldn't have." Even if it meant a big butterfly effect for the rest of the roster.

My take: If you wanted Towns still on the roster, the trade to look at is likely the Gobert one. The Wolves did it so they could accelerate the timetable for Edwards to play consistent playoff basketball on a regular basis, but it did mean that a few years down the road they were going to be paying high luxury tax bills regardless of the kind of CBA that was in place. Was there really an appetite to pay those large luxury tax bills from ownership year over year, even as Glen Taylor, who owns the Minnesota Star Tribune, ultimately gave way to Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez?

The front office believed the team it inherited wasn't a sustainable winning team, so it made the Gobert trade. The deal came after Towns was unplayable at times during the Wolves' 2022 first-round series loss the Memphis Grizzlies. He has grown a lot since that time.

Connelly's guiding mantra has been he isn't afraid to take big swings and if the Wolves mess up, so be it. But it just might sting a little more when a player you traded could be holding a Finals MVP trophy two years later.

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This story was originally published June 9, 2026 at 5:31 PM.