Fansided

The Whiteboard: Karl-Anthony Towns is thriving in a tough spot

Karl-Anthony Towns has given the Knicks everything they could have hoped for and more.

By Matt Moore

Dec 21, 2024; New Orleans, Louisiana, USA; New York Knicks center Karl-Anthony Towns (32) grabs a rebound against the New Orleans Pelicans during the second half at Smoothie King Center. Mandatory Credit: Stephen Lew-Imagn Images
Dec 21, 2024; New Orleans, Louisiana, USA; New York Knicks center Karl-Anthony Towns (32) grabs a rebound against the New Orleans Pelicans during the second half at Smoothie King Center. Mandatory Credit: Stephen Lew-Imagn Images / Stephen Lew-Imagn Images
facebooktwitterreddit

Karl-Anthony Towns never asked for this.

The abrupt trade of Towns to the Knicks before the season was not the typical star trade to New York. Towns wasn’t looking for a bigger market to showcase his talents, and he’s expressed a continued sense of shock and at least sadness that he was forced to leave.

This makes the way he’s responded this season all the more impressive.

Towns is averaging 25 points and 14 rebounds per game while shooting 45 percent from three-point range. Towns is the only player to average those figures in league history.

He and Jalen Brunson have combined for one of the best pick-and-roll combos in the league. No, scratch that, the best pick-and-roll combo in the league.

The Knicks are averaging 1.099 points per possession in pick-and-roll including passes to shooters and cutters. It’s the highest mark of any team in the past 21 seasons of Synergy data.

Towns has been so good as to supplant Brunson as the best player on the Knicks, and Brunson was a fringe MVP candidate last season.

To do all this when he’s had to deal with a trade from the franchise that drafted him and which has been his home for so long makes it all the more impressive. It would have been understandable if Towns struggled to adapt or shrank into himself on the court.

Instead, he’s embraced the hard work and has helped take the Knicks to the third-best record in the East and the Knicks look like a serious contender.

Now, the fairy tale doesn’t end here and surely, the feel-good Towns story will end with a playoff exit that leaves everyone clowning him again. That seems to be his lot in life.

Towns has always come off as a player that wants to be great and wants to be a winner but doesn’t know how to do it. He’s tried being too bold, too brash, too intense. Now he’s just KAT, hitting threes from Brunson passes and rebounding at the best rate in the league.

Who knows how this chapter in Towns’ book works out, but for now it’s time to appreciate a player put in shocking circumstances in a high-pressure, hot-spotlight position who has done nothing but bring everything he has to it.

Subscribe to The Whiteboard, FanSided’s daily email newsletter on everything basketball. If you like The Whiteboard, share it with a friend! If you don’t like it, share it with an enemy!

NBA news and rumors roundup

  • The hits keep coming for the Magic who lost Mo Wagner to an ACL tear. Orlando simply cannot go more than a week without a major injury to a rotation player. One of those seasons.
  • The Nuggets snuck by another bad team, beating the Pelicans in overtime. Denver is the worst good team in the league by a wide margin right now.
  • The Kings’ spiral continued with a loss to the Pacers. The Kings are a lost team right now and the pressure is ramping up with De’Aaron Fox’s representation meeting with the Kings recently.

Five stories under the radar

1. Speaking of the Pacers, they might have pulled out of their own spiral. They’ve won four in a row for the first time this season and started to turn the offense around.

2. With Christmas around the corner, the Sixers are starting to get things together. They’re just four games back in the loss column from the 6th seed. If they pull off a win vs. the Celtics on Christmas Day, could we actually put their nightmare fall behind them now that it’s officially winter?


3. It’s a real battle between the Kings and Wolves for who’s in a worse place. Sacramento was blown out at home by the Pacers after losing back-to-back games to the Lakers at home while the Wolves were trounced by Towns in his return “home” and then by the Warriors. The pressure to trade Julius Randle is going to go up, but what if there are other rotation players on the way out too?

4. What happened to Phoenix? They looked unstoppable with Kevin Durant to start the season. Now Devin Booker’s out with a groin issue and their defense has imploded. It’s been sudden, confusing, and potentially disastrous given what they’ve leveraged on this core.

5. The Raptors are super competitive and a lot of fun ... but they also are going to wind up in the lottery. They’ve lost seven in a row now and have a real shot at a top-four lottery spot. At some point, the math makes more sense to go for the pick.

feed

Home/The Whiteboard