How are NBA GMs and execs trying to build teams and compete in the age of equality?

• Part three of a five-part series ahead of the 2024-25 NBA season, describing how the league arrived at this era of parity and key questions that remain. First episode Part II

Karl-Anthony Towns was having dinner with his girlfriend at a New York restaurant when he stopped for a moment and tapped Towns on the shoulder.

“Do you really believe this is our life now?” Jordin Woods asked him, two weeks after Towns' nine-year run in Minnesota came to a surprising end with a trade with the Knicks. “We're both still in shock.”

The deal that sent Towns to New York in exchange for Julius Randle, Donte DiVincenzo, Keita Bates-Diop and a first-round draft pick came three days before the start of training camp. It also came during the Timberwolves' first run to the Western Conference Finals in 20 years, something coach Chris Finch said would not have happened without Towns' performances in the first two rounds of the playoffs against Phoenix and Denver. .

So why would Minnesota trade an All-Star player who has been there since being drafted No. 1 in 2015 and was such an important part of a promising team just days before the most anticipated season in franchise history?

The Timberwolves believe the additions of Randle and DiVincenzo will give them a chance to be as good or better than last season's version: tougher, deeper and more versatile as they chase the team's first NBA Finals appearance.

But another major factor in the decision was the chance to finally come under the dreaded second apron, a level of spending that, under the league's new collective bargaining agreement, carries penalties so severe from a financial and team-building standpoint that it makes it unthinkable. Making a winning list is difficult.

Trading Towns, who is entering a four-year, $220 million contract extension this offseason, gives the Timberwolves a path to get under the apron next season, giving them more flexibility to continue building around rising young star Anthony Edwards.

Executives around the league are grappling with new financial rules that are forcing them to make tough decisions with All-Star caliber players sooner than they possibly want, while also making it more difficult to pull off trades. That played a factor in the Golden State Warriors, a team that historically has never batted an eye at a huge luxury tax bill, deciding they couldn't keep Klay Thompson, one of the most beloved players in franchise history. Thompson signed with the Dallas Mavericks in free agency.

That's why the LA Clippers, even with owner Steve Ballmer's bottomless pockets, didn't give All-Star Paul George the long-term deal he wanted and let him go to Philadelphia.

“The bottom line is it forces you to move on from players you don't want to move on from,” said one Western Conference decision-maker. athletic.

If a team decides it has to make a deal for competitive or financial reasons, it becomes much more difficult to close. Teams above the second apron — $188.9 million this season — cannot send total players to trades and must pay salaries on both sides, unlike non-apron teams, whose salaries can be within 25 percent of each other. They can't use cash to help facilitate a trade and can't trade first-round picks seven years into the future.

“The process of how you get a deal done is just impossible,” said another Western Conference executive.

Second apron teams also cannot use the mid-level exception in free agency. If a team is above the second apron in two of the four years, its first-round pick from seven years out will automatically move to the bottom of the board. These conditions reduce the margin of error for typical managers who always have one eye on the current day's inventory and the other on the future.

“It's not like you have to hit a home run on every deal,” says one executive. “But every deal now comes with some other decisions as you get closer to the apron because they start moving stuff for you to be able to do it. So you have to get the initial steps right.”

While that may be frustrating at the ground level, in many ways that's exactly what the league wanted when it negotiated the new contract with the players' union. NBA commissioner Adam Silver has made some sense of parity a real priority as the league evolves, trying to combat a long-held belief among fans in some markets that the deck is stacked against them. It is now much harder for even the most well-heeled owners in the most glamorous markets to avoid the barriers that have been put in place to redistribute talent across the league.

“What I'm hearing from the teams, even as the second apron is going in, the teams are realizing that those provisions have real teeth,” Silver said at the Las Vegas Summer League board of governors meeting.

The Timberwolves and Knicks learned how difficult it is to make a deal while trying to trade Towns. The Wolves are on the second apron, so the Knicks had to go through a maze of tactics to make all the money work, including signing a player from overseas and trading him to the Charlotte Hornets.

It's a deal that couldn't be done during the regular season because players can only be signed and traded in the offseason, another pressure point that makes it important for Minnesota to get it done before camp opens.

“The new rules, some of the consequences are unintended, quite frankly,” Timberwolves president of basketball operations Tim Connelly said, speaking in general terms and not specifically about the Towns deal. “I don't know if anybody intended for it to be so challenging to move, trade, when you're on certain aprons.”

It was uncomfortable for Golden State to see Thompson leave. He won four championships with Steph Curry and Draymond Green, a trio that was supposed to be together eventually. But the Warriors devoted more resources to young players in recent seasons as Thompson worked his way back from two major injuries, dealt Andrew Wiggins and Jordan Poole big money and signed Curry and Green to extensions. That didn't sit well with Thompson, who signed a three-year, $50 million contract with the Mavericks in a sign-and-trade deal.

On a smaller scale, the Denver Nuggets had to say goodbye to key players Bruce Brown and Kentavis Caldwell-Pope in back-to-back years after winning the title in 2023. The Timberwolves saw Kyle Anderson, one of Finch's favorites, leave for Golden State. Because he was very expensive.

Watching the Clippers hold the line on George was almost as stunning as Thompson holding the Mavericks jersey at his introductory press conference. Ballmer has been one of the league's most aggressive spenders since taking over the Clippers in 2014. But all these new rules are making him a more realistic bean counter.

“I think we're going to be very good in the short term,” Clippers president of basketball operations Lawrence Frank said this summer, “and we're going to have flexibility in the long term that will make it sustainable.” organization that is always trying to win championships.”

The Celtics are bringing everyone back after winning the championship last season, but even the prospect of potentially being one of the league's last dynasties is making Boston sick. The Celtics will eventually have to make some tough decisions about a core that includes Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Joey Holiday and Kristaps Porginis, and it looks like owner Wyc Grousbeck will leave those decisions to someone else after selling his majority ownership stake. Within the franchise

“When you're me and you're told if you have a $75 million tax bill, we'd better parade it, you've got to make tough decisions,” one general manager said. “For teams that get into repeaters, it makes it that much more challenging to put together a championship-quality roster.”

Even parties not approaching the tax apron are having to make adjustments. There was a time when these teams were fertile ground for deal-making, often using their cap space to acquire draft picks from playoff hopefuls to bolster their rosters. But apron restrictions on trades, which require almost dollar-for-dollar matching, can make it extremely difficult for rebuilding teams to find landing spots with contenders for players not in their long-term plans.

The choice is becoming more and more difficult.

“You're going to see with the owners how much pain they can take,” said one executive.

Whether it's because of paying through the nose for a star-studded roster or going belly-up, a team loses a lot of avenues to adjust its roster in the future, these next few years could be a bit rocky as everyone adjusts.

Not everyone is blinking yet. The Phoenix Suns will have a roster that will spend more than $400 million this season when the luxury tax is factored in, with new owner Matt Ishbia going in pursuit of a title. Philadelphia was able to add George to a core of Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey to finally make it through the Eastern Conference.

As daunting as the new landscape can be, some executives see it as another puzzle for them to solve.

“You learn the rules and then you figure out how to optimize them,” said one executive. “You'll see things and find different loopholes that will be exploited.”

The Knicks were able to do just that with the Towns deal, signing three players to help them overcome some of the restrictions they had no intention of playing on contracts above the league minimum of $1. There will be other methods that cap-savvy teams will discover along the way. Meanwhile, business as usual in the NBA will look a lot different.

That much was clear for Towns when he faced his former team Sunday in a preseason game at Madison Square Garden. It was an emotional evening for him after spending his entire career in Minnesota. But life, and the second apron, go on.

“The business of basketball just keeps going,” he said. “It doesn't matter how you feel. It doesn't matter how life treats you. You have to come here every day ready. Put your city on the map and do your best for your teammates and your organization.”

(Image: Mitch Robinson: athletic; (Photo by Klay Thompson, Karl-Anthony Towns, Paul George, Julius Randle/Getty Images)