SAN ANTONIO — In the midst of the most successful stretch of his 11-year professional career, Karl-Anthony Towns shared his secret.
“In my career, if I’ve learned anything, it’s just, ‘Don’t get too excited,’” Towns said with a laugh before Game 4 of the Eastern Conference finals. “Don’t be excited; just continue to do the job. I wake up every morning and just have the same mentality: I want to go out here and play the best basketball I can and be the best at my job tonight.”
Towns reiterated that message after the Knicks finished a four-game sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers, punching their ticket to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999 — and securing his first trip to the championship round after falling short in the conference finals in each of the last two years.
“I’m gonna enjoy this moment, flying back with my teammates, having this understanding of what we’ve done,” Towns said. “It’s a magical thing, a historical thing. It’s something that New York has been dying for for a long, long time, and we’ll enjoy that plane ride. But once we get in those cars and go to our respective homes, it’s gonna be back to business.”
It’s a recipe that’s working for Towns, who has been playing the best basketball of his life and who has been damn near the best dude in the world at his job over the past six weeks — a stretch that has seen the New York Knicks transform from a fringe contender into an onrushing tsunami that swept away the Eastern Conference, thanks in large part to the 30-year-old big man’s ability to find the best version of himself and his game at the best possible time.
The 6-foot-11, 250-pound Towns came into the league seemingly ticketed for greatness. He was so prized as a prospect coming out of Piscataway, N.J., such a remarkable combination of size and skill at such a young age, that John Calipari wound up coaching the Dominican Republic national team in 2011 and 2012, of which Towns was a member even as a high schooler, as part of what essentially amounted to a multi-year recruitment to Kentucky. Towns landed in Lexington in 2014 and was a consensus All-American for a legendary Wildcats squad that won 38 straight games before falling to Wisconsin in the Final Four. He went first overall in the 2015 NBA Draft and promptly began producing at levels that only a handful of players in NBA history had ever reached as a rookie — all of which only raised the anticipation and expectation of what he could become.
That pedigree, promise and production made it easy to imagine Towns one day reaching the rarefied air of the NBA Finals. It’s how he’s gotten here, though — not as the unquestioned centerpiece of his organization, but as the finishing piece whose arrival helped unlock everything around incumbent superstar Jalen Brunson — that’s been so remarkable.
“You know, everybody looks at KAT as a scorer — ‘Oh, he can score. He doesn’t do this, he doesn’t do that, but he can score,’” Knicks head coach Mike Brown said at the team’s practice facility during New York’s lengthy layoff between Game 4 against Cleveland and Wednesday’s Game 1 against the Western Conference champion San Antonio Spurs. “And to make it — especially as an All-Star-slash-leader-slash-one of the guys — this far, you have to bring more to the table. And it’s great, because he can be able to display to the entire world that he’s more than just a talented scorer.”
Getting to a place where he was comfortable displaying that diversity of talents took Towns some time. After New York’s disappointing end to the 2025 Eastern Conference finals, the subsequent firing of head coach Tom Thibodeau and the hiring of Brown, who brought with him new offensive principles that would change the timing, placement and frequency of Towns’ touches, the All-NBA big man spoke openly in the early going about feeling adrift as he tried to figure out how he fit into the bigger offensive picture.
“Honestly, I don’t know,” Towns told reporters before the season. “I just don’t know. But we’re figuring it out. It’s just different. It’s different. So we’re still figuring it out.”
The process took time, and no small amount of trial and error. Early in the season, the Knicks were winning, having just come off their run to the NBA Cup, and Towns’ two-way impact was arguably better than it had been in years. But his scoring was down, he was posting the worst shooting numbers of his career, and his floor time was down a bit, logging under 32 minutes 10 times in the first two months of the campaign.
The curtailed workload was part of a take-the-long-view approach that Brown and his staff hoped would help keep the Knicks’ stars fresher longer into the postseason. In the moment, though, it can be jarring to a player accustomed to a certain level of opportunities, as Knicks forward Josh Hart colorfully explained at Tuesday’s NBA Finals media day session.
“I definitely didn’t see the bigger picture in those moments,” Hart said. “There was moments I went home and I’m like, ‘Damn, am I ass? Do I suck as a basketball player?’ There was a lot of those moments. Whenever your minutes go down or you get benched, you have that thought process. But for me, it was, ‘OK, how can I build off of it? How can I improve as a player to not put myself in that situation?’”
Towns built off it by continuing, even amid the struggles to get in where he fit in on offense, to put in consistent nightly effort on the glass and on the defensive end. Brown met him halfway, finding ways to get him a steadier diet of some of the looks he prefers — a tweak that made Towns more comfortable and helped keep him fully engaged in the broader project of getting the Knicks through another 50-plus-win regular season, back into the playoffs and in position to showcase what they believed to be a deeper, more versatile roster that was better equipped to survive the postseason gantlet than its predecessor.
When the Knicks ran into trouble in Round 1 against Atlanta, though, lurching through possessions with Brunson largely blanketed by Dyson Daniels and in search of another form of offense, Towns went from the edges of the bigger picture back to the center of the frame.
Reorienting the offense through Towns as a playmaking hub — at the top of the floor, on the low block, in the pinch post — revamped, revitalized and revolutionized the Knicks’ attack. Brunson, Hart, OG Anunoby and Mikal Bridges all thrived as off-ball menaces, screening and cutting and slicing into open space, trusting Towns to find them — which he did, to the tune of eight assists per game over New York’s final three wins over Atlanta and subsequent four-game second-round sweep of Philadelphia.
“I just love that I get to get my teammates involved, and I get the chance to quarterback the offense and put them in positions that I feel they could succeed, and they’ve obliged,” Towns said after the Knicks’ Game 2 win over the Sixers. “Like I said before, they’re trusting me more with the ball right now, and I just want to continue to repay their trust with the right plays and making the right decisions.”
That sort of central playmaking role is the way Towns says he “always wanted to play […] so it’s great that we found a way to get it going.” But when circumstances, personnel and game plan dictated that the Knicks go away from a heavy diet of high-post work against the Cavaliers in the conference finals, Towns pivoted, more aggressively looking for opportunities to drive to the basket and take his shot. He averaged half as many assists against Cleveland as he did during the previous seven wins, but shot 57% inside the arc and 50% beyond it, finishing a series-high plus-79 in yet another four-game sweep.
“We do a great job of adjusting as the game goes along,” he said after Game 3 against the Cavs. “For me, I have to always be able to adapt to what the game needs from me. The first half, it needed me to be a scorer, finding a way to be aggressive and shoot the ball well. And then the second half, they adjusted and we adjusted and I had to adjust. The adjustment was more of being the hub, making passes and getting my teammates involved and allowing them to make those mistakes because of the aggression in the first half.
“For me, I continue to just feel out the game. It will tell me what to do.”
The game is telling Towns to do some of everything — facilitating, spacing the floor, attacking off the bounce, hitting the offensive boards, dominating the defensive glass, playing nimbly in space at the level of the screen, walling off the paint — and he’s doing it at an unbelievable level.
Dunks and Threes’ estimated plus-minus metric, which aims to evaluate how much a player impacts his team’s chances of winning, pegs Towns’ play as worth 7.3 points per 100 possessions to the Knicks this postseason. That is second in the playoff field, behind only Victor Wembanyama (+9.3) and is closer to Wemby than third place (Anunoby and Thunder guard Ajay Mitchell at +5.0) are to Towns.
It is also higher than any individual season of Towns’ NBA career and more than twice his EPM this regular season, when, among players to appear in at least 60 games, he already was a top-15 player in the NBA — one that, full disclosure, I thought deserved an All-NBA nod.
“KAT is one of the most talented basketball players I’ve ever been fortunate to be teammates with,” Knicks guard Landry Shamet said Tuesday. “I think he’s lived through a number of different seasons within the season this year, as well, where we’ve asked him to do some different things.”
He’s done them brilliantly. Towns’ dribbles per touch are down, and his pass-out rate on drives is up — from 18.8% of drives during the regular season to 30.6% during this 11-game winning streak (a rate that’s actually a touch above Brunson’s full-season mark). He’s taking fewer shots per possession and making them more efficiently than he ever has. His usage rate is at a career postseason low; his block and steal rates are both career highs.
“He does everything,” Shamet said. “There’s not a lot that he can’t do. We rely on him every night in a lot of different areas. He’s super important to us. Obviously he’s a big piece to our success.”
For the last six weeks, Towns has arguably been the best player in the Eastern Conference — the most complete, fully actualized expression of the wide range of skills that made him such a tantalizing prospect all those years ago. And it’s as big a reason as any why the Knicks find themselves four wins away from their first NBA championship in 53 years.
“I never doubted my ability,” Towns said after finishing off the Hawks, a victory that propelled the Knicks on this historically remarkable run. “I never doubted the work I put in. It’s just — you gotta adjust. You gotta adjust. Especially [with] a lot of new things being thrown at you, you’re being asked to do a lot more things — some things that [haven’t] consistently been asked of me in my career.
“Anyone who knows me, who’s followed my career, [knows] I’m willing to sacrifice and do whatever it takes for the team to win. And I think this year I’ve shown that again. Whatever the team needs me to do, the player the team needs me to be, I’ll step up to the plate, step up to the challenge.”
What faces him now might be the biggest challenge in the sport — literally and figuratively.
Towns will likely see a bulk of the defensive assignment on Wembanyama to start out, taking first crack at trying to accomplish something nobody else in this postseason has: slowing down the sport’s new ascendant monarch. On the other end, though, while it’s tempting to say that Towns’ role will be to use the threat of his 3-point shooting to draw Wembanyama out of the paint, it’s more likely that the Spurs will do what the Cavaliers did, opening up with Wembanyama cross-matched onto Hart and a wing (either Stephon Castle, Julian Champagnie or Devin Vassell) sliding over to KAT, as San Antonio tries to both keep Wemby stationed as close to the paint as possible and limit the potential damage of the Brunson-Towns two-man game.
“You know, they’re a smart group, and they’re not gonna just match up that way the entirety of the game,” Shamet said at practice over the weekend. “We know that. Every team’s gonna play the game, mess with matchups and whatnot. And obviously, Karl’s shooting is something that anybody has to honor, and that changes the game plan entirely. […] However they decide to match up with it, there’s gonna be pros to that. There’s also gonna be cons to that and areas that we’re gonna try to exploit.”
Some of that exploitation will come down to Hart needing to make the wide-open shots he gets and find ways to create good looks for his teammates by getting them open as a screener and making plays from the pocket. Some of it, though, will require Towns to take advantage of the mismatch he’s getting, whether by taking smaller defenders into the post, facing up on them at the nail or muscling them up on drives to get to the line and finish through contact.
He has to do all of that without committing silly or ill-timed fouls. And pull physical shifts on Wembanyama — and perhaps one of the smaller perimeter Spurs if Brown decides to go with a cross-match of his own, with Anunoby picking up Wemby. And keep the frequently corner-crashing Spurs off the offensive glass. And, and, and, and.
It’s a big job. But after knocking on the door of the championship round without being able to walk through it, Towns sounds eager for the responsibility.
“As a competitor, as an athlete, you ask just to give yourself a chance every single year,” Towns said last week. “The last two years, three years, I have, and finally I was able in the third year to get over that hump and give myself a chance to see what I can do.”
Beating the Spurs will require Towns to explore the outer limits of that capacity — to stretch all of his skills to their breaking point; to apply them efficiently, judiciously and relentlessly.
“This is a culmination of what a life’s work in basketball comes to, playing in an NBA Finals,” he said Tuesday.
If Towns and his teammates can come through four times on the grandest stage of all, all the work they’ve done to breathe new life into a long-moribund franchise — “to be part of this team that revives the word ‘hope’ in the city,” as he put it after beating Cleveland — will have paid off. But there’s a long road to travel between here and the Larry O’Brien Trophy, and Towns is intent on not skipping any steps as he walks it.
“I’m just focused on the task at hand, honestly,” he said Tuesday.
Sounds like something Knicks fans can get excited about.