Karl-Anthony Towns, you are an All-Star once again.
Towns, who earned his first career All-Star starting nod under Tom Thibodeau last season, didn’t make the cut as part of the opening five in a down year under Mike Brown.
But the 29 NBA head coaches tasked with selecting the reserves saw the same thing: a perennial All-Star averaging 20 points and 10-plus rebounds for a team still positioned to make a legitimate championship push near the top of the Eastern Conference.
To Brown, it was a no-brainer. His peers agreed.
Towns was named a six-time All-Star roughly 45 minutes before tipoff against the Los Angeles Lakers on Sunday — a nod that arrived amid a strange statistical season by his standards. His 20.0 points per game are the fewest he’s averaged since his rookie year a decade ago. His league-leading 11.8 rebounds per game are down from last season and only slightly above his career average (11.1). His field-goal percentage (46.1) and three-point efficiency (36.1) are both hovering near career lows.
And he entered Sunday’s game tangled in Giannis Antetokounmpo trade speculation — the kind that would almost certainly require Towns’ $54 million salary to make the math work — nearly one year to the day after the Lakers beat the Knicks at Madison Square Garden last season, then stunned the league by trading Anthony Davis to Dallas for Luka Dončić overnight.
Context matters. So do facts.
And the fact is this: Towns remains the second-most important player to the Knicks’ potential championship formula.
He is still a walking mismatch — one the Knicks have not fully optimized — and a dominant force on the glass. His back-to-back 20-rebound performances entering Sunday gave him the most such games by a Knick this century, despite having spent just a season and a half with the franchise.
More importantly, in Brown’s view, Towns — alongside All-Star starter Jalen Brunson — is one of the engines driving a winning team, even if the Knicks’ coach believed New York deserved more than two All-Stars when reserve announcements were finalized.
“I’m a firm believer that winning should be a big factor in [All-Star voting], and we’re sitting third in the East right now, so we should have multiple guys on the [All-Star] team,” Brown said ahead of tipoff. “Jalen definitely is in the MVP conversation, but we have other guys on this team that have stepped up and helped in a lot of different ways. KAT — he’s leading us in rebounds, he’s second in scoring, I don’t know how many double-doubles he has, but that’s impactful when you’re talking about doing it in a winning situation.”
Brown made a softer case for OG Anunoby and Mikal Bridges, but neither has been consistent enough offensively — and the Knicks themselves haven’t been dominant enough wire-to-wire — to justify three-plus All-Stars. Towns ultimately joined a reserve group that included Cleveland’s Donovan Mitchell, Atlanta’s Jalen Johnson, Indiana’s Pascal Siakam, Miami’s Norman Powell, Toronto’s Scottie Barnes and Detroit’s Jalen Duren.
Boston, despite holding the East’s No. 2 seed with Jayson Tatum sidelined all season due to an Achilles injury, did not land a second All-Star — a fact unlikely to be forgotten when the Knicks visit TD Garden next Sunday.
Out West, Anthony Edwards, Jamal Murray, Chet Holmgren, Kevin Durant, Devin Booker, Deni Avdija and LeBron James rounded out the reserves.
“You can throw other guys in there — possibly OG, especially when you combine his defensive prowess, and Mikal, and you know Josh who’s right there too,” Brown said. “But we should have, in my opinion, two-to-three guys at least on this All-Star team based on what our record is.
“Not only that — we were the NBA Cup champions. So there were a lot of positives that, in my opinion, went into this.”
They were NBA Cup champions. Then they lost nine of their first 11 games to open the new year. Since then, they’ve steadied themselves, entering Sunday on a five-game winning streak.
That bounce-back may have been the difference between Towns earning another All-Star nod — and someone else being left on the outside.
