As the NBA season finally barrels toward its conclusion, we’re down to the final stage of the journey. After an 82-game regular season and nearly two months of playoff basketball, there are, at most, seven games remaining. Standing at the finish line are two teams with very different stories but one fascinating connection to Minnesota basketball.
On one side sits the San Antonio Spurs, the team that ended the Timberwolves’ season in May and spent six games methodically demonstrating why so many people
believe Victor Wembanyama is destined to dominate the NBA for the next decade. On the other side are the New York Knicks, led in part by the former face of the Timberwolves franchise, Karl-Anthony Towns, whose blockbuster departure from Minnesota in 2024 remains one of the defining moments of the franchise’s recent history.
If you’re wondering where Wolves fans are likely to stand during this series, I don’t think it’s particularly complicated.
They’re standing with KAT.
You don’t spend nearly a decade carrying a franchise through some of its darkest years and then suddenly lose the support of an entire fan base because you got traded. For all the frustrations that occasionally accompanied Towns’ tenure in Minnesota, for all the playoff disappointments, for all the debates about whether he could ever be the best player on a championship team, it’s easy to forget what he actually meant to this organization.
When Towns arrived, the Timberwolves were still wandering through the post-Kevin Garnett wilderness. The franchise was largely irrelevant nationally. Playoff appearances were a pipe dream.
Towns became the bridge. He wasn’t the player who ultimately turned Minnesota into a perennial contender, that distinction belongs to Anthony Edwards, but he was the player who kept the franchise afloat long enough to reach that point.
He endured coaching changes, front-office dysfunction, roster overhauls, the Jimmy Butler saga, the Tom Thibodeau era, the Rudy Gobert trade fallout. Through all of it, he remained remarkably loyal to a franchise that often gave him more headaches than help. So yes, Wolves fans are spending June cheering for a former player. It’s understandable, and frankly, it’s deserved.
What makes this Finals particularly fascinating is that it feels like two completely different basketball realities colliding.
The Knicks have spent the last several weeks looking like a team of destiny. Everything has worked. Everything.
They stormed through the Eastern Conference with an efficiency that bordered on absurd. The Hawks, 76ers, and Cavaliers put up minimal resistance. In the rare moments where New York was challenged, they displayed the kind of confidence and momentum that tends to accompany teams that believe they’re on a special run.
The city is alive. Madison Square Garden is operating like a basketball cathedral again. It’s been 53 years since New York last won an NBA championship. The drought has lasted so long that it has almost become part of the franchise’s identity. And now they’re four wins away from ending it.
The problem is that reality has a funny way of crashing through fairytale stories, and that reality currently wears a Spurs jersey.
As impressive as New York has been, we should probably acknowledge something that’s being glossed over a little bit. The Knicks road to the Finals was not exactly lined with basketball murderers. They had the privilege of facing the 6th, 7th, and 4th seeds on the way to the Finals. That’s not meant to diminish what New York accomplished. You can only beat the teams in front of you, and the Knicks did exactly that. In fact, they didn’t merely beat those teams. They dominated them.
But now they’re stepping into an entirely different weight class.
After eliminating our talented, but injured Timberwolves, the Spurs marched into the Western Conference Finals and knocked off Oklahoma City, a team many people believed was destined to win the championship. The Thunder entered the postseason looking like the league’s final boss. They had the MVP. They had elite depth. They had home-court advantage. They had youth. They had experience. They had seemingly everything.
And yet here we are, with the Spurs are representing the Western Conference.
While the Knicks have looked dominant, San Antonio has looked dangerous. The Spurs possess a player who can completely distort the geometry of basketball. Every generation gets a player who forces us to rethink what basketball is supposed to look like. Kareem did it. Jordan did it. LeBron did it. Steph did it. Wembanyama feels like the next entry on that list.
So what happens in this series? Honestly, I think there are only two outcomes. The first is the one every basketball fan is hoping for. Six or seven games full of momentum swings, last-second shots, Garden crowds losing their minds, and Wembanyama doing alien things. The type of Finals people still talk about five years later.
The second possibility is far less exciting. The Knicks’ magic carpet ride crashes into reality. The Spurs’ talent advantage becomes overwhelming. Wembanyama takes control of the series, and what looked like a dream run suddenly turns into a fairly quick conclusion.
I genuinely don’t know which outcome we’re getting. That’s what makes this matchup fascinating. One team arrives carrying the hopes of an entire city that hasn’t celebrated a title since 1973. The other arrives carrying what increasingly feels like the future of the NBA.
Either way, Wolves fans will spend the remainder of this season cheering for Karl-Anthony Towns. Nearly two years removed from the trade, Towns remains one of us. And if he somehow ends up holding the Larry O’Brien Trophy a few weeks from now, there are going to be a lot of people in Minnesota smiling right alongside him.
Go get it, KAT.
