While news of the New York Knicks' trade of Karl-Anthony Towns broke suddenly last week, the front office had been pursuing a deal for him over the past several months. The Knicks' need for a center with Mitchell Robinson's injury issues expedited their pursuit for Towns.
"This pursuit of Karl-Anthony Towns really picked up steam over the last, I think, week, two weeks when the Knicks started calling Minnesota about him," said Shams Charania on the Throwbacks podcast. "Making offers. Making concepts of offers. They were just given hard no's repeatedly. Way back, even around draft time, July, and into the months of August, a lot of the offers Knicks were conceptually discussing, from what I'm told, were around Julius Randle and Mitchell Robinson. From Minnesota's perspective, that was not going to get it done.
"Over the last week is when finally the inclusion of Donte DiVincenzo was included in this proposal, not Mitchell Robinson. So then you have Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo. But still that was a "no." Minnesota wanted an asset. [Friday] night, the Knicks, from what I'm told, finally put that first round pick from Detroit on the table.
"We got wind [Friday] that there were active conversations. Ongoing conversations. I didn't know until maybe 15-20 minutes before we dropped the news, me and my colleague Jon Krawczynski at The Athletic.
"You never know when it's a deal that's this fluid, when you get wind a couple days out it's active, it's outgoing."
One of the complications of completing the trade was finding a third team to help facilitate the deal.
"The deal for the Knicks over the past several days is finding who that third team is going to be," added Charania. "They had a few teams lined up. Charlotte became the team for them."
