Championship contenders trading with each other are rare, and you don’t have to look far back to understand why.

Just a year ago this week, the Milwaukee Bucks made a blockbuster trade with the Portland Trail Blazers to acquire Damian Lillard, but that inadvertently led to Jrue Holiday landing with the Boston Celtics. Holiday proved to be the crucial final piece for Boston’s quest to build a championship team within Milwaukee’s own conference.

But the New York Knicks and Minnesota Timberwolves each had a unique set of problems, and they became each other’s best solution. It created an uneasy and unexpected alliance that led to two contenders trading two former All-NBA players – Karl-Anthony Towns and Julius Randle – just before the start of training camp, as snappy a move as you’ll ever see in September.

The Knicks’ problems started in the middle, specifically their lack of a starter. New York has built a wall around the extent of starter Mitchell Robinson’s foot problems. The Leon Rose administration is good at keeping secrets, which is why the Knicks did not lose leverage in these trade negotiations. But internally, New York plans for Robinson to be out for at least three more months. Will it be more? Hopefully not, but no one knows for sure. Isaiah Hartenstein, who served as Robinson’s backup the past two seasons and started 49 games in his absence last season, already departed in free agency, leaving New York dangerously thin (and short) up front.

Meanwhile, no progress was made last summer in contract extension talks with Randle, who was likely headed to free agency in 2025. Randle, who has been an all-star each of the past two seasons, had seen the franchise around him completely change over the past two seasons. the past nine months, and he wasn’t sure where exactly he would fit on a team built around Jalen Brunson and former Villanova teammates. Randle knew he would likely play a lot of rough minutes out of position at center in what was shaping up to be a contract year.

There’s also this: If there was one player Rose coveted more than Brunson, a de facto member of his family, when he was hired as Knicks president in 2020, it might have been Towns. Rose, both with deep Jersey roots, had bonded with Towns when he was a teenager and had been with him as his agent from his days at Kentucky until he was picked No. 1 overall and became a max contract player.

And now Towns was more available than ever. The Wolves are trying to win a championship amid a financial and ownership crisis.

Minnesota, a franchise that has generally operated frugally for decades, faced a loss of more than $100 million this season, sources said, because of a huge luxury tax bill that had to be paid with new contracts for Towns and Anthony Edwards. But it’s not just about this year; the coming years are potentially financially punishing.

Lawyers for longtime owner Glen Taylor and the potential ownership group led by Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez will begin arbitration on Nov. 4, with a decision expected around the new year.

After the discovery process over the summer, Lore’s group has become confident it will win and has put all its finances in order, sources said. They plan to start the proceedings with more than $900 million in bail, with the support of billionaires Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. They will also show more than $200 million in working capital, sources said, showing they can complete the purchase of the final 60% of the $1.5 billion transaction and then finance potentially huge losses in the future.

But even if it turns out that Taylor violated the terms of the sales agreement when he took the team off the market last spring, the arbitrator’s ruling won’t be the final word. The remaining 29 governors will vote on the sale. If Taylor no longer wants to sell, will his partners of the past forty years go against him? Lore could win in court but lose if he joined the club. That’s why he and Rodriguez have tried to gain support in dozens of meetings with other owners over the past year. It seems like lawsuits are in store either way.

Meanwhile, Wolves team president Tim Connelly has one of the best executive deals in all of sports. He has a lucrative $40 million contract to run the team and has negotiated a free-out clause so he can essentially leave whenever he wants, largely because he has no idea who will be his boss. He could become one of the most coveted free agents in the summer of 2025.

And while Connelly built a roster that reached the conference finals in 2024 — only the second time in franchise history the Timberwolves advanced beyond the first round of the playoffs — Minnesota’s situation became more complicated when Edwards was part of last season to the All-NBA team. , which earned him a $41 million contract increase. It’s worth every cent, but no longer a bargain.

Towns is starting a four-year, $224 million extension signed when he looked like the top franchise player in 2022. Unlike Randle, Towns had seen his role change since that deal, as he had become a willing supporter of Edwards.

Last year, Towns took great pride in earning a spot on the All-Star team as he handed the reins to Edwards. Towns had previously sought assurances from Connelly that he would not be traded as he wanted to establish himself in that role. Connelly, who has built powerful teams in Denver and now Minnesota, said all the right things in their meetings but ultimately couldn’t deliver on that promise, sources said. Honestly, he couldn’t when he looked at this landscape.

While all this was playing out, one of Connelly’s great moves, keeping backup center Naz Reid, turned into a masterstroke. Reid developed into the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year, averaging 13.5 points per game and shooting 41.4% from 3-point range. Reid is no Towns, but he is an excellent long-range shooter who is very effective playing with top defensive end Rudy Gobert.

Gobert and Reid have player options for next season and while Gobert likely won’t leave his $46 million on the table, it was almost impossible to imagine the Wolves paying them both in addition to Towns’ $53 million number in 2025-26 (Reid is scheduled for 2025-2026). to earn $15 million if he picks up his option).

Put it all together and you’ll see how late on a Friday night in September Towns was sent packing for Randle and Donte DiVincenzo.

The Knicks get their franchise center — affordable thanks to Brunson, who is now inexplicably the team’s third-highest paid player after leaving $113 million on the table in his extension this summer — and the Wolves save eight figures this year and potentially tens of millions more in coming seasons, while freeing up space for Reid and bolstering their bench with a great shooter.

When the smoke clears from all this, it will become clear how difficult it was to make this happen. Multiple players will be signed and traded to make this work, with the Charlotte Hornets facilitating, sources said.

The Knicks are expected to twist themselves into an impressive pretzel to give up no more rotation players, sources say, and somehow get less than $200,000 under the second platform, which they are not allowed to break, and multiple draft picks pay to oil it. .

It’s not clear if Randle will be happy enough with the situation to extend his contract in Minnesota or if the Wolves can even afford him. Or, honestly, who will make that decision on the team side.

The question is whether the Knicks should have taken a few months with their new Villanova-laden team to see: 1) Randle’s playing ability, 2) Mitchell’s progress post-surgery, 3) What other centers might be on the market had become available.

But it’s also not unreasonable to imagine the Wolves and Knicks playing each other in the finals next June. And that, after all this, is the starting point.