Karl-Anthony Towns Gave Up Shots to Win a Ring. Now He Wants the Max

Karl-Anthony Towns

Photo: Dennis Adair from Gainesville-StPetersburg, FL / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 15, 1995 Piscataway
Occupation	Basketball Player
Honours	NBA Cup 2025
Individual awards	NBA Rookie of the Year Award

On the night the New York Knicks finished off the San Antonio Spurs, Karl-Anthony Towns spent long stretches in foul trouble and on the bench, and he and OG Anunoby could barely buy a basket between them while Jalen Brunson carried the closeout on his own. Nobody in orange and blue minded. Towns had spent a whole season turning himself into a player whose value lives outside the box score, and the trophy was the receipt. The awkward part came later. A sacrifice that wins a championship is hard to price, and Towns is now asking the Knicks to price it.

He was built to be the opposite of a role player. The son of Karl Towns Sr., a former Monmouth forward, and Jacqueline Cruz, who came from the Dominican Republic, he was born in Edison, New Jersey, and grew up in Piscataway. At St. Joseph High School in Metuchen he won three straight state titles and the Gatorade National Player of the Year award. Before he could drive, he was already wearing the Dominican Republic jersey at the Centrobasket tournament.

Kentucky offered the first preview of the bargain he would strike a decade later. Born on November 15, 1995, and named the nation’s top high school player in 2014, he landed on John Calipari’s 2014-15 team, the one that went 38-1 before losing to Wisconsin in the Final Four, and averaged 10.3 points in 21 minutes a night. It was enough. The Minnesota Timberwolves made him the No. 1 pick of the 2015 draft, and he answered with a unanimous Rookie of the Year season: 18.3 points, 10.5 rebounds, 82 starts.

Minnesota became the place where his numbers grew and his teams mostly did not. Towns made the All-NBA Third Team in 2018 and signed a supermax extension that September, the same autumn Jimmy Butler forced his way out of town in an exit widely read as a verdict on the young core’s edge. The playoff trips were short: five games against Houston in 2018, six against Memphis in 2022. In between came the feats that defined his reputation as a shooter, a 60-point night against the Spurs and, in 2022, a win in the three-point contest, the first ever by a center. In January 2024 he scored 62 against Charlotte, 44 of them before halftime.

He played that 2024 run to the Western Conference finals, Minnesota’s first in two decades, as one piece of a team now built around Anthony Edwards, with Rudy Gobert beside him in the paint. Dallas ended it in five games. By then Towns was carrying something else. His mother died of complications from COVID-19 in April 2020, and the virus took six more of his relatives. He spoke about it in public when many athletes stayed quiet, and his work on voting rights and criminal justice, including the documentary Forgiving Johnny, which he produced, earned him the league’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Social Justice Champion award.

The trade came on October 2, 2024: Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo to Minnesota, Towns to New York. His first Knicks season looked like a vindication on paper, with 24.4 points, 12.8 rebounds and a third All-NBA selection. The tape told a messier story. The Athletic reported that coaches and teammates were frustrated by his defensive coverages, and Indiana knocked the Knicks out of the Eastern Conference finals in six games. Tom Thibodeau, who had coached Towns in both cities, lost his job. Mike Brown replaced him.

Brown’s answer to the Towns question was subtraction. His minutes fell from 35 to 31, his shot attempts dropped to 14.5 a game, the fourth-lowest figure of his career, and his scoring slid to 20.1 points. Plenty of observers called it a waste of the best-shooting big man in the league. They have a point that the title does not erase: Towns has three All-NBA Third Team selections and no higher one, and the defensive doubts that followed him from Minnesota never fully left. His record-setting plus-minus is a team statistic as much as a personal one, and in the clincher he was closer to a passenger than a protagonist.

Still, the playoffs made the argument for Brown. New York, 53-29 and the third seed, beat Atlanta in six, where Towns posted his first playoff triple-double, then swept Philadelphia and Cleveland. Against San Antonio he opened with two double-doubles on the road, and the Knicks won the Finals 4-1 on June 13, 2026, their first championship since 1973. Brunson was Finals MVP. Towns averaged close to 16 points and more than 10 rebounds across the run and finished with a plus-minus of +258, the best for a single postseason in NBA history. The NBA Cup, won in December 2025, had been the rehearsal.

The summer that followed belonged to a different Towns. He had a cameo as himself in The Devil Wears Prada 2, trading lines about Knicks courtside celebrities with Anne Hathaway at Miranda Priestly’s Hamptons house. In July he climbed out of a cloning machine at WWE’s Saturday Night’s Main Event at Madison Square Garden to chokeslam Dominik Mysterio and JD McDonagh. On August 15 he married Jordyn Woods in Malibu, eight months after proposing on Christmas Day, and he reported to media day on September 28 visibly leaner.

Then he talked about money. Towns earns about $57 million this season and holds a $61.1 million player option for 2027-28. He is eligible for a four-year extension worth up to $276 million, and reports put the Knicks’ offer near $200 million, with owner James Dolan refusing to cross the league’s second apron and extensions for Brunson and Anunoby due next summer. “I want to do something that can keep the team together and work with the Knicks and also values me,” he said on October 5. Asked about a deal before opening night, he was blunter: “It don’t look good.”

The Knicks raise their banner at the Garden on October 20, and Towns turns 31 on November 15. Between those two dates sits the question his whole career has circled: whether he is worth more as the scorer he could still be or as the teammate who agreed not to be. New York has already answered on the court. The front office now has to answer in writing.

Tags: sports, athletes, nba, Jalen Brunson, new york knicks, basketball players, Karl-Anthony Towns, The Devil Wears Prada 2

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