What makes the Knicks-Timberwolves trade so fascinating

It's a rare deal where both teams are really going for it right now.

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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Two Ladies on a Terrace; Konstantin Korovin; 1911

My brain and it appears the basketball discourse continues to buzz about the late Friday trade sending Karl-Anthony Towns to the Knicks with Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo heading back to the Timberwolves. This is a trade likely to stick with us for a long, long time.

Upon reflection, one of the biggest reasons is that both the Knicks and Wolves are absolutely going for it.

The Knicks already traded for Mikael Bridges this summer, and traded for O.G. Anunoby at the trade deadline last season. They were the No. 2 seed and a game from the conference finals despite being ravaged by injuries in the postseason. Jalen Brunson is a top-10 player, Tom Thibodeau is a top-10 coach, Bridges and Anunoby make up one of the best wing duos in the league on paper, and the Knicks organization is hungry for a title run or three. Moving some depth and future flexibility to take on Towns’ massive salary is a play to win bigger. It’s a play to rival the Celtics, a play to build a sustainable superpower or metaphorically die trying. Good enough is not good enough. The Knicks will no longer be happy to be there. That ship’s left the harbor.

New York hasn’t really shown any patience once the front office discovered that Brunson isn’t just a nice player, but a great player. Think about it this way: Randle and Anunoby played 16 games together (the Knicks went 14-2), and instead of seeing whether that version of success was real, or whether that version plus Bridges was special, the Knicks traded Randle for a better, more expensive player at the cost of DiVincenzo. That’s an example of really, really going for it.

The Wolves are also very much going for it, albeit from a slightly different angle.