NBA Analyst Says 'Relentless' Karl-Anthony Towns Deserves His Own Moment in the Knicks' Dominant Sweep

For nine seasons, the scouting report on Karl-Anthony Towns was simple enough to fit on a napkin. Elite shooter, soft interior presence, statistical monster on losing teams. Then Mike Brown moved to New York, moved Towns to the perimeter, handed him the offense’s connective tissue, and everything the league thought it knew stopped applying.

When ESPN’s Jay Williams stopped the conversation on Sunday to specifically credit Towns after New York’s 144-114 demolition of the Philadelphia 76ers completed a second-round sweep, he was identifying something the numbers had started screaming weeks ago. This version of Towns, at 30, operating as a playmaking hub inside a ball-movement system, is a different basketball problem than anything his previous coaches asked him to be.

In 20 minutes of work Sunday at Wells Fargo Center, a building packed with Knicks fans cheered louder than the home crowd. Towns went 5-for-7 from the floor, dished 10 assists against two turnovers, posted a plus-23, and was on the bench well before the fourth quarter even mattered. It was, in miniature, the paradox of what he has become: less volume, more impact, earlier exits because his team no longer needs him past the third quarter.

The Knicks won four straight to close the Hawks series by an average of 25.8 points. They haven’t lost since. “The real change for us came before Game 4 in Atlanta,” Towns told reporters. “That’s when we really changed our offense. It’s been great. It’s been something I’ve talked about for a lot of the season, to feel like we can help our guys more. We made the right moves.”

1. The Secret Mid-Series Move That ‘Unlocked’ Karl-Anthony Towns and Changed Everything for the Knicks

Here’s what Williams said, “I also want to take a second today because obviously we’ll talk about shooting and we’ll talk about their offense, but like you have to give Karl-Anthony Towns a round of applause. I mean regardless of how Joel Embiid looked, like he attacked. He was relentless. Last night, 17 points, 10 assists, and by the way, him being unlocked by Mike Brown has opened up this system in order for them to be the best version of themselves.” The moment Mike Brown’s offense actually became what he envisioned it to happen quietly in Atlanta, not New York. The Knicks had just lost Game 3 of the first round to the Hawks and found themselves down 2-1, facing the possibility of a first-round exit in Brown’s debut postseason.

2. The Mind-Blowing Playoff Stat That Confirms Karl-Anthony Towns’ Radical Transformation

The most startling number in the Knicks’ postseason run is not their plus-194 point differential across 10 games; the best such 10-game span in NBA playoff history. Nor is their 12 wins by 30 or more points, which ties the 2024-25 and 2025-26 Oklahoma City Thunder for the most in a single season including playoffs. It is Karl-Anthony Towns’ 6.6 assists per game in these playoffs. His previous career postseason high was 2.6. Every one of Towns’ six-assist-or-more playoff games, across his entire career, has come in the last two weeks. That is not a gradual evolution. It is a transformation that arrived almost fully formed once Brown gave him the green light. In Game 4 against Philadelphia, he opened with five points, five assists, and three rebounds in the first quarter alone as the Knicks went on to outscore a spent 76ers team 43-24 in the opening period, building a lead they never seriously surrendered. By halftime, New York led 81-57. His work, for all practical purposes, was done. The secondary effect, the one that sustains him in the rotation and keeps his playoff longevity intact, is that playing in space rather than jostling in the post has made Towns harder to foul out. He has still managed five fouls in four of his ten playoff games, evidence that cleaning up his decision-making remains a project in progress. But by moving him away from the grind of post position, Brown has made Towns’ most disruptive habit less likely to surface at the moments when it does the most damage. Joel Embiid had returned to playoff basketball 17 days after emergency appendectomy surgery in Houston, dragged Philadelphia back from a 3-1 first-round deficit against Boston in three of the most remarkable games of his career, and then absorbed a Tyrese Maxey collision to his legs late in Game 7 in Boston. By the time the Knicks series began, his body was already in a different condition than it had been at any point this season. He missed Game 2 entirely. In Games 3 and 4, he was visibly limited by right hip and adductor complications he later described as stemming directly from returning too soon after surgery.

3. How Mike Brown’s Sabonis Blueprint Built an ECF Juggernaut That’s ‘Just Scratching the Surface’

When the Knicks hired Mike Brown, the most common comparison in coaching circles was to what he had built in Sacramento, specifically the way he had used Sabonis as an offense-enabling hub, a center whose passing and screening created advantages for everyone around him rather than asking him to generate points for himself. The parallel to Towns was obvious from the outside; it apparently took time, and a near-first-round exit, for it to fully take hold from the inside. Brown now has a team in the Eastern Conference Finals for the second consecutive year, awaiting the winner of the Cleveland-Detroit series. They have used 10 players productively in these playoffs. Miles McBride led Sunday’s rout with 25 points off the bench. Brunson contributed 22 points and six assists as the primary scorer. Josh Hart added 17 points and nine rebounds. The Knicks are making 13 percent more threes this season than they did under Thibodeau, and the spacing those attempts create has turned their half-court offense from a Brunson-isolation system into something more difficult to prepare for and harder to shut down. Brown has said consistently throughout the playoffs that his team is “just scratching the surface” of what it can become offensively. Whether that is true, or whether it is the kind of phrase coaches offer reporters when a series has gone well, the Knicks’ postseason performance makes the claim at least plausible. They have not faced a fully healthy opponent in this run. The Western Conference semifinal between San Antonio and Minnesota will send a harder test than either of the two teams New York has faced. But that is an argument for another round, and the Knicks will have time to prepare.

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