Knicks Star Puts Up Most Crucial Playoff Performance Yet

For a player who's nearing the end of his tenth season as a staple player in the NBA, Karl-Anthony Towns' playoff resume lacks some of the moments some of his other decade-long veterans have to offer.

He's been inconsistent during the New York Knicks' ongoing playoff run, hopping in for the occasional heat check before returning to the generally ineffective pick-and-popping center we've seen across the last month.

After several series of missed threes and getting caught in defensive mismatches, he finally had a singular team-saving playoff moment in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals. With New York desperately clawing to avoid the kiss of death that is a 3-0 deficit, he capped off a personal scoring stretch that Knicks fans will be sure to remember now that the team's finally made their series against the Indiana Pacers interesting.

KAT's had to wait a while to meet these kind of win-or-go-home stakes, and that isn't even necessarily his fault.

Towns was drafted to the languishing Minnesota Timberwolves in the mid-2010s, where nothing of note got accomplished across his first five years. A brief relationship with Jimmy Butler resulted in a quick first-round-and-out playoff appearance in 2018, but KAT was afforded few opportunities to make some moments for himself without a sustainably good roster of supporting pieces as a fringe-franchise player.

He finally looked to be hitting his peak when the team hit one of their greatest lulls, and won the right to draft Anthony Edwards in the 2020 draft. He accepted a tertiary leadership role in the locker room as Edwards grew into the more obvious alpha dog, co-captaining the ascending Timberwolves from lottery regulars into contenders.

Edwards helped grant Towns the first playoff run of his career last season, finally making it past the first round in the center's fourth career postseason berth and running all the way to the Western Conference Finals. They couldn't hold up against Luka Doncic's surging Dallas Mavericks, but the stiff one-on-one defense Towns displayed in the series prior against that year's MVP in Nikola Jokic proved pivotal in upsetting the championship-proven Denver Nuggets.

That was the first playoff highlight of his career, but he'd never posted that one huge, series-altering performance until Sunday's Game 3, when he scored 20 points in the fourth quarter alone on a flurry of 3-pointers and hard finishes at the rim. After past concerns with his mental makeup and how his game translates to high-pressure situations, he finally delivered like a franchise star when his team needed him in a pinch.

Karl Anthony Towns 4th quarter take over in progress new meaning of Times Square. pic.twitter.com/pBzXLM0OmE
— Global Utopia Sports (@GL8BAL_SPORTS) May 26, 2025

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