Karl-Anthony Towns’ worst big-game habits emerge as Knicks get eliminated by Hawks in NBA Cup

The Karl-Anthony Towns trade has, overall, been a success for the New York Knicks so far. He’s scoring more points than in any season since the 2019-20 campaign and posting new career highs in rebounds and nearly every shooting efficiency category. The Knicks entered Wednesday’s game against the Atlanta Hawks with a 15-9 record and the NBA #1 ranked offense. Not a bad start for a team discovering its identity as it goes.

But that game against the Hawks on Wednesday wasn’t just any regular season game. It was a quarterfinal of the NBA Cup. The winner would advance to Las Vegas to face the Milwaukee Bucks. The version of Towns that the Knicks have largely gotten all season might have been enough to boost them in Atlanta. That wasn’t the player they got on Wednesday.

No, the Towns New York got on Wednesday was the player Minnesota was willing to trade, the one with a litany of bad habits that tend to show up at the biggest moments. The score line was relatively innocuous: 19 points on 2 of 6 3-point shooting. It’s not great or terrible, but Towns let the way he was officiated affect him. He played frustrated, racked up four turnovers and got into foul trouble, as often happens in the playoffs. Their defense, the only weakness in their excellent start to the season, was almost absent.

Atlanta scored 66 points in the paint on Wednesday, almost 20 more than the Knicks allow per game on average. There were obvious positives. He grabbed 19 rebounds and distributed five assists. But those fouls and turnovers were part of what caused the Knicks to lose this game.

Fouls have been a persistent problem for Towns in big games. He has fouled out at least four times in more than half of his career playoff games (18 of 32) and fouled out in three of them. That doesn’t include a 2022 Play-In Tournament game in which he fouled out after 24 minutes, and his teammates bailed out by winning the rest of the game by 19 points. He was much better from a turnover perspective last spring, but averaged 3.6 turnovers per game in his first three trips to the postseason.

Mistakes like these are critical in big-game environments, when teams are locked in and game plans are more thorough than usual. Opponents have been able to bother Towns in the past. It affected the Knicks as a whole on Wednesday. They spent much of the second half playing listless, disorganized basketball. Towns wasn’t entirely responsible for that, but he didn’t help either.

The Knicks won’t cry over missing a trip to Las Vegas. Josh Hart might be missing out a new watchbut the trophy this team is fighting for is awarded in June, not December. But the NBA Cup would have been a good testing ground for a team still finding itself.

Such a new group certainly could have taken advantage of games in a playoff atmosphere to get in some extra reps. Wednesday was the closest the Knicks have come to doing that this season, and they disappointed across the board. If the Knicks are going to compete for the trophy that matters in June, they’ll need the version of Towns they’ve had most of this season, not the inconsistent version that keeps showing up at the worst possible times.