Karl-Anthony Towns’ impact in Minnesota goes deeper than basketball as a promise is kept

BLAINE, Minn. — Not even 15 hours after having his socks knocked off by a trade that ended his nine-year run in Minnesota, Karl-Anthony Towns strolled onto Field 49N at the National Sports Center, a sprawling youth soccer complex that was playing host to over 300 teams from across the Upper Midwest for the Fall Cup. He had a promise to keep.

Wearing a green Timberwolves hat and a black Timberwolves shirt, he stood in the corner of the field under an unseasonably hot late-September sun and watched an under-12 girls game while still wrapping his head around the Timberwolves having just traded him to the New York Knicks.

His world had been turned upside down. His phone had not stopped pinging with text messages. The trade that brought Julius Randle, Donte DiVincenzo and a protected first-round pick to Minnesota was still being finalized. And yet, there Towns was because long ago he had told one of the girls on the green team that he would watch her play one day.

He thought there would be plenty of time for that. Suddenly, there wasn’t. A flight was scheduled for the next day to whisk him away to New York, so he piled into the car with his father and his friends and headed to the field about 20 minutes north of downtown Minneapolis.

As he stood there, parents craned their necks and whispered to each other because it’s hard for a 7-foot, four-time NBA All-Star to keep a low profile in this kind of setting.

Is that Karl-Anthony Towns? That is!

Word started to spread. Girls from other teams that had just played or were waiting to take the field streamed toward him, sheepishly saying hello and asking to take pictures. He obliged every one and asked them how their games were going. Boys who grumbled about being forced to go watch their sisters play were probably singing a different tune on the ride home. Referees hustled over as soon as the game was over.

Almost all of them had a respectful and simple message for him: “Thank you.”

Nine years is a lifetime in the NBA. The girl he was coming to see was 3 months old when Flip Saunders drafted Towns No. 1 overall in 2015. The parents ogling him watched him grow from a 19-year-old kid into a 28-year-old man. They saw him handle success (NBA Rookie of the Year, four All-Star games, two All-NBA teams, a 3-point contest championship and last season’s run to the Western Conference finals), failure (missing the postseason five times, playoff struggles against Dallas in 2024, Denver on an injured knee in 2023 and Houston in 2018) and heartbreak (Saunders died from lymphoma before Towns played a game and Towns’ mother, Jacqueline, died from COVID-19 in 2020).

Dozens came by to pay their respects, all of them knowing he was on his way to New York. The kids smiled nervously and told him they were sorry to see him go. They said they wished he was staying.

“Maybe one day you will come back,” a young girl wearing a white jersey and bright green cleats told him.

Towns smiled widely. He encouraged them to focus on having fun and laughed when one of them told him he would see her on TV one day, just like him. He seemed like he needed this after a wild night that few saw coming.

It felt like a reflective moment, a time to look back on his stay in Minnesota and what it all meant. He might not have delivered championships to Minnesota as he openly talked about. He did not develop into the kind of player who singularly guarantees a 50-win season and a chance to go deep into the playoffs. He won two playoff series in his nine seasons and missed the playoffs entirely four times.

He also departs as the Timberwolves’ career leader in 3-pointers made and PER (Player Efficiency Rating) and is second to Kevin Garnett in most other major franchise categories, including scoring, rebounding, blocked shots and minutes played. He holds the top three spots on the team’s single-game scoring chart. And he finished his run with the Wolves with three straight playoff appearances, including the team’s second conference finals berth in 35 years last season after he hurried back from midseason knee surgery.

The team’s success and the way he dutifully changed his role to accommodate Rudy Gobert and Anthony Edwards in recent seasons has Towns leaving at a time when the respect for him in these parts has never been higher.

The story of the Towns era in Minnesota is not one of disappointment or a partnership not working. It is a story of accomplishment that they were able to stay together as long as they did while enduring so much strife along the way.

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On his first day in Minnesota as a Timberwolves player in 2015, a fresh-faced Towns and his parents walked the skyways of downtown Minneapolis with Wolves caps on while fans lost their minds at seeing a player they envisioned as the answer to all their prayers for a downtrodden franchise. The family walked into the team’s shiny new practice facility, Jacqueline’s smile and energy filling the cavernous court and Karl Sr. marveling at a gift from the team to its newest member: a golf bag with a Timberwolves logo on it.

It looked like a perfect match. After all, Twin Cities is just a fancier way of saying Towns. The annual general managers survey conducted by NBA.com picked Towns for two consecutive years as the player GMs would most like to build their teams around. He was very much in the conversation with Nikola Jokić and Joel Embiid for the best young big man in the game. With Andrew Wiggins and Zach LaVine by his side, the Wolves appeared to be coming out of a long, cold winter.

As often happens in life, the older Towns got, the more complicated things became. Tom Thibodeau traded LaVine for Jimmy Butler in 2017, a marriage that proved to be doomed almost from the start. Butler demanded a trade in 2018 and was shipped to Philadelphia. That sealed Thibodeau’s fate as well. Wiggins, Ricky Rubio, D’Angelo Russell, Robert Covington and Tyus Jones have all come and gone over the years, unable to give Towns the help he needed to get out of the first round of the playoffs.

The Wolves bottomed out after Butler and Thibodeau were jettisoned, winning just 19 games in the 2019-20 season. Injuries, enormous personal loss and roster upheaval followed and Jokić and Embiid rocketed past him on the NBA’s superstar ladder.

Through all of the change and turmoil, Towns was the one constant. Seven general managers and five head coaches circulated through team headquarters in downtown Minneapolis during KAT’s first seven years in the league, leaving him to be the public face of a team that could not seem to get out of its way.

Fans started to point the finger at him, especially after Butler made the NBA Finals with the Miami Heat, which seemingly turned into a referendum on who was right and who was wrong in their messy split. Frustration was expressed with the way he complained to officials and the ill-advised passes he would throw over his shoulder for turnovers.

Towns could make himself an easy target sometimes. When he got excited, he could say some wild stuff, like when he went on Patrick Beverley’s podcast and said that making it out of the Play-In Tournament was in some ways as impressive as the Denver Nuggets winning the 2023 title. On the same pod, he said he had not proposed to girlfriend Jordyn Woods because he was “married to the game.”

Corny? Yes. But harmless. And yet he became one of the league’s favorite pin cushions. He was poked over and over again about things he would say and do, to the point where even heartfelt gestures like waving to the Target Center crowd to say thank you after the Wolves were eliminated by Memphis in the 2022 playoffs became the subject of derision.

He would kick his leg out on 3-pointers and hook his defender’s arm on drives, and there were moments of tension along the way. Towns was appalled at the way Butler was allowed to torpedo an entire season when Butler demanded a trade. Navigating injuries could be tricky. Things got icy for a minute last season when KAT scored a franchise-record 62 points against the Charlotte Hornets, but all coach Chris Finch could do afterward was fume when his team gave away the game in the fourth quarter.

The thing about this pairing was that they always found a way through it. It’s easy to pull the ejection handle these days. Easy for a player to look at a situation and say, “Get me out of here,” or for an organization to get frustrated with a player and ship him out. That never happened here. They worked through their differences and stayed together. For nine years, a relative eternity.

Now Towns is leaving the Timberwolves in a much better place than he found it, thanks to how he graciously handled the arrivals of Gobert and Edwards and tailored his game to complement theirs. And thanks to the organization hiring Tim Connelly and Finch, assembling one of the most talented rosters in the league and entering this season with designs on another deep playoff run.

And those fans who gnashed their teeth through the lean years started to rally around him in recent seasons. They pushed back at the “soft” label, pointing out that there was nothing soft about a player enduring what he endured on a personal level and never opting for the easy way out. They started to stand up for him when the pundits made jokes at his expense and they celebrated his return to All-Star form last season.

Off the court, the appreciation has never been in question. His coat drive every winter kept thousands of underprivileged kids warm. He would host families in need for movie screenings at the team facility around Christmas and everyone would leave with gaming systems and Beats headphones. He once saw a social media post that launched a fundraising drive for a man who had his car stolen for the third time in a calendar year. KAT just bought him a car.

Last season a local pizza place gained wide acclaim for putting a sign out front that said, “Honk if you love Naz Reid.” When the sign maker’s mother died in May, he posted a GoFundMe looking for help with costs incurred. KAT saw it and donated $1,500. After news of the trade spread, the sign was given a temporary new look.

This is still Naz’s sign…but sometimes you have to pay respect to the people who helped pave the way. Thank you KAT. The Timberwolves will never be the same without you. You are a wolf forever 🙏🏻@KarlTowns pic.twitter.com/yx5o8hJ1vC

— K👁🌲🐺🌲 (@Kgformvp211) September 29, 2024

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As Towns leaned against a fence and watched the soccer game, one girl had a natural question for him.

Why are you here?

He paused for a moment and said he came to watch his niece, pointing to a 9-year-old running around with the No. 32 on her back. KAT met Nita and her brother, Owen, years ago when I brought them to practice one day. He came over and handed them headbands, which was enough for Nita to be convinced that they were friends forever. She wears 32 because of him and has been known to sleep in a Towns jersey at night.

At 12:30 a.m. Saturday, about three and a half hours after Connelly visited him at his home to tell him he was being traded, a text message hit my phone from “32” asking about my kids.

“Let me know where you at tomorrow,” it read. “They got sports or anything?”

I told him Nita had a tournament, and he said he would be there. They only had a few brief meetups over the years, but KAT would ask often about how they were doing, especially when Owen was experiencing some health issues that kept me from a few road trips in the playoffs. He vowed to come see them play one of these days.

“I gotta see my little ones,” he wrote. “Just reciprocating love.”

I didn’t expect him to make it. Not with so much to do in so little time. But he did. Much like his first day in Minnesota, his second-to-last day was spent decked out in Wolves gear and mingling with fans who couldn’t believe their luck to run into him. He took every picture that was asked of him, politely chatted with kids and grownups and gave hugs when they were offered. He told Owen he was proud of him for overcoming everything he had been through. The smile never left his face.

Maybe he needed it as much as they did. One final reminder of an impact that goes so much deeper than basketball.

As Nita’s game ended, she came over to us in the corner of the field. He pulled her aside, wrapped her up in a hug and whispered in her ear for a minute.

There are two things I did not do that day. I did not ask him for an interview. It was easy to see he was still processing the news and the emotions were still raw. And I did not ask Nita what he said to her.

That was just for them.

((Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; top photo of Towns: Jesse D. Garrabrant / NBAE via Getty Images)