Karl-Anthony Towns Sees Your Gruel, And Raises

There was a great sequence late in the second quarter of Tuesday night's NBA Cup match between the Orlando Magic and the New York Knicks. Great for a neutral viewer, certainly great if you are a Knicks fan. Less great if you are the fan of the Orlando Magic, but still pretty fun! The Knicks were pulling away from the Magic, up 21 points at about the three-minute mark, and Magic head coach Jamahl Mosley put Moritz Wagner into the game. I assume this substitution was scheduled, but it was also appropriate to the specific moment: the offensive gravity of Knicks center Karl-Anthony Towns was tugging Magic counterpart Wendell Carter Jr. all over the court and largely negating his defensive value, and the Magic were badly losing Carter's minutes. Moe is a change-of-pace type of player, both because he exemplifies try-harderism and because he is happy to play the pest and work his way under an opponent's skin. And Mosley needed someone to upset the rhythm of the game: This may have been an early-December contest but the depleted Magic needed to manage the final margin in order to advance in the tournament, a dynamic that juiced up the competition all the way to the final buzzer.

Wagner came on, worked a dribble hand-off with his brother Franz, then immediately re-screened Franz's defender and chugged into the paint, where he received a slick feed on the go and banked in a quick layup. The set had some nice flowing Wagner-to-Wagner chemistry, and Towns, who'd been exploited by the quick screens and darting action, seemed slightly annoyed. Seconds later, on the Knicks' ensuing possession, Towns made himself a little too angular setting an off-ball screen on the wing and wiped out Franz, earning an offensive foul. Again Towns seemed annoyed. The Moe Wagner Gambit was already showing signs of promise.

On the very next play, Franz and Moe worked a two-man game on the right wing, again exploiting Towns by forcing him to defend multiple actions at multiple spots in the same possession. Moe screened for Franz to go toward the baseline; Franz pulled his defender into the screen and then snaked it—reversed course and dribbled across the path of his defender, forcing the defender onto his back—a maneuver that benefits from smooth coordination and careful spacing between the screener and the ball-handler. The larger Wagner hesitated around the free-throw line in order to clear out the room and keep Towns in no-man's land, attempting to deter the ball-handler while also staying attached to his man. When Franz sealed OG Anunoby onto his backside, Moe darted into the paint and smashed into Towns, utilizing what is sometimes referred to as a Gortat screen: A not-entirely-legal maneuver where an offensive player pretends to seal his defender under the basket but is really just setting a rough moving screen on the defense's last rim protector. This worked: Franz glided through the paint and dropped in a lefty layup. Score another for the Wagners, who often appear to have a Bryan brothers-like mind meld when they are operating in the same offense. Towns was super annoyed!

He became very much more annoyed on the following New York possession. The Knicks isolated him on the left elbow against Moe, clearing the rest of the offense to the far side of the court. When Towns was a little careless with the ball, Moe swiped down on it and knocked it loose, and then clattered into Towns in a play for the loose ball. Towns collected the ball on the low block and immediately made to bully his way into the paint with a heavy left shoulder. Moe must've anticipated this, because he met Towns's lunging shoulder with one of his own, disrupting Towns's balance and annoying him so much that Towns briefly stopped playing basketball, took a deep sighing breath, and looked off into the middle distance, in exactly the manner of one whose over-sugared child has just thrown a cup of juice across the living room. For a split second, I thought maybe I'd failed to notice a whistle; several other players on the court seemed to share my confusion.

I will admit that I have not always been a big believer in Karl-Anthony Towns. I liked him as a rookie, but I like all rookies. By approximately the third week of his second season, I had decided that he was annoying. He seemed to play with a kind of entitled petulance, and his extreme difficulties with defending the pick-and-roll, which persisted for just about the first six seasons of his NBA career, drove me crazy. For a long time I judged him from afar to be a losing type of player, a perception that was easy enough not to update considering that for years at a time there was no very compelling reason to check in on the Minnesota Timberwolves. Towns's offensive excellence had a metronomic quality, both in the sense that it was entirely dependable and in the sense that amid a symphony of dynamic performances you are right to pay it no attention whatsoever. Nudge me in the shoulder when this guy wins anything or figures out how to become even an average defensive player, and not a moment sooner.

But I like Towns now. The Wolves got serious around him, and they got other players who could do more of the work of anchoring the team's defense and setting its personality, and it turns out that Towns isn't any more calibrated to losing than anyone else. I like the whole idea of that, as a social and human story as much as a basketball one, that a person can find a different environment and a rejiggered set of responsibilities, and thrive, and upend expectations. The part of me that annoys me the most, apart from the inner tube of flab weighing down my midsection, is the tendency to form harsh judgments and to leave them unexamined. It's better to be wrong about these than to be right.

A younger version of Towns might've committed a cheap foul here, or several, or thrown a sulky kick-out pass and then griped his way into a technical foul, or all of the above. This one took the moment to collect himself, then twisted over his right shoulder and buried a gorgeous fallaway jumper to stem the flow of momentum. The Wagners came right back; Franz took a pass in semi-transition and was fouled in the paint, and buried his free throws. Jalen Brunson then threw a nice move at Jalen Suggs and beat him cleanly to the cup, but Suggs, one of the best shot-blocking guards in the game, recovered and emphatically swatted Brunson's layup attempt. On the subsequent inbounds play, Towns took the ball on the low block and again attempted to truck Mo, who stood his ground admirably but fouled Towns on his shot attempt. Yes, the Magic were getting pretty well cooked on the scoreboard, and yes, Wagner had just sent a career 84-percent free-throw shooter to the stripe, but also he was battling like hell and doing his job and feeling good about it. He clapped, the big proud clap that is meant to signal that a competitor is having the time of his life down in the shit. And Towns, whose blood was also quite warm in this moment, clapped back. This ruled!

Ed Malloy—a veteran referee who ought to know better—assessed the two players offsetting technical fouls, for clapping in enthusiasm about the level of intensity of a tournament game during what is otherwise the dreariest and least consequential-seeming part of the NBA calendar. The statements had been made, and the battle—generally and delightfully out of proportion to the context—continued. Towns sank his freebies. On the following Magic possession, Franz got an angle for a drive to the cup but Towns leapt out and threw up a huge long arm and forced a high floater. Moe pulled in the offensive rebound, but Towns was there, too, forcing an awkward and soft attempt at a putback, which OG Anunoby punched away with emphasis. Josh Hart pushed the ball the other way and eventually pitched it to Anunoby in the corner. Anunoby jabbed at Franz and then rose up for a somewhat audacious contested three-pointer, and buried it.

The margin was back to 22 points, the New York crowd was in a frenzy, and the wind had been entirely stolen from the Wagners' sails. I remarked aloud, to an empty living room, that it will be so incredibly cool if the Knicks still have legs at playoff time. The Magic are a really good team: Entering the game they had the third-best defense by points per possession in the NBA, and even without Paolo Banchero they are more than capable of suffocating the competitive spirit out of otherwise perfectly competent opponents. Some shit-ass teams will beat the Magic even after having largely given up on doing so, by hitting a lot of the bad shots the Magic allow them to take, and by benefitting from the occasional slumps of Orlando's not-very-impressive offense, which currently ranks 23rd in efficiency according to Cleaning the Glass. But more often than not the league's also-rans shrink from the intensity and execution of teams like Orlando, that make you work like hell for every inch of space, and in that shrunken condition most teams simply cannot string together enough success to win a basketball game.

What is impressive about these Knicks, and what was on display in the second quarter of Tuesday night's victory, was how impervious they seemed to be to the grueling conditions imposed by the Magic. They love the gruel! The Magic pushed the gruel button at what seemed to be the right moment, and gruel flowed, and Orlando initially benefited by the gruel. And then the Knicks out-grueled them, and somehow this out-grueling was led by Karl-Anthony Towns, who for most of his career has been among the the most gruel-less players at his position in the sport.

You expect a certain desperate hunger for gruel from a Thibodeau team, and from a team with Brunson and Hart and Anunoby, and for that matter from a team with Julius Randle. You—or, at least, I—don't usually expect this quality from Towns. I expect him to make his shots, which he did. The productivity matters, too: Towns, under Thibs, is putting up career bests in three-point percentage, defensive rebounding percentage, overall rebounding percentage, turnover ratio, and net rating. The guy obviously can play some basketball. But the thing that Towns finally proved in Minnesota appears to have carried over to New York: He's got a little bit of an appetite for the hard, brutal, grinding work of digging wins of various sizes out of tough places and unlikely scenarios. If Thibs can resist powderizing Towns's skeleton between now and June, the Knicks are going to be such a wonderful filth monster when the going gets tough.