Atlanta Hawks: Could Hawks Pull Off Karl-Anthony Towns Trade?

A quick look at a potentially shocking trade the Atlanta Hawks could potentially make this offseason.

Despite the NBA Playoffs taking many of the headlines due to the first round barely being underway, there are still plenty of highfalutin and pie-in-the-sky roster construction article on NBA teams that are circulating throughout the internet as of this moment – including a recent one that includes the Atlanta Hawks.

A recent piece by Grant Hughes of Bleacher Report explores multiple surprising trades that alter the landscape of the league if they were, in fact, completed. Many of them are rather unlikely, such as Boston giving up Jayson Tatum for Devin Booker or Anthony Davis getting traded to the Philadelphia 76ers for Ben Simmons.

One trade that Hughes lays out involves the Atlanta Hawks giving up a vast amount of assets to acquire Karl-Anthony Towns of the Minnesota Timberwolves:

The first thing that comes to mind when pondering KAT and the Hawks is that time when he torched Atlanta to the tune of a career-high 56 points after playing PlayerUnknown Battlegrounds into the wee hours of the morning with Ben Simmons:

In the abstract, this deal is extremely unlikely to happen anytime soon, as Towns just signed a supermax extension with the Wolves after Jimmy Butler was traded during the 2018-19 season. The deal is a five-year/$190 million pact and pairs him with Andrew Wiggins for much of it.

While Towns might like to be free of Wiggins’s anchor-like presence on the team’s roster structure and salary cap, it seems nearly impossible that he would turn around and ask for a trade directly after signing that deal.

For the Atlanta Hawks, short-circuiting the team’s rebuild by trading the team’s own 2019 first round draft pick in addition to the Mavericks’ 2019 one is also incredibly unrealistic, as this team looked quite good to end the season.

Though the core of Towns, Trae Young and Omari Spellman would certainly be interesting going forward, and Towns would help vault the Hawks into playoff contention in the East, that’s just too many young players to give up in return – though is likely equivalent to what Towns’s value is right now.