How are NBA GMs and execs trying to build teams and compete in the parity era?

• Part III of a five-part series ahead of the 2024-25 NBA season, chronicling how the league reached this era of parity and the key questions that remain. Part I | Part II

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

“Do you really believe this is our life now?” Jordyn Woods asked him, two weeks after Towns’ nine-year run in Minnesota came to a surprising end with a trade to 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 training camp started. It also came on the heels of the Timberwolves’ first run to the Western Conference finals in 20 years, something that coach Chris Finch said would not have happened were it not for Towns’ performance in the first two rounds of the playoffs against Phoenix and Denver.

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

The Timberwolves believe that adding 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 eventually get under the dreaded second apron, a level of spending that, under the league’s new collective bargaining agreement, brings penalties so severe from a financial and team-building perspective that it makes it incredibly difficult to construct a winning roster.

Trading Towns, who is starting a four-year, $220 million contract extension this season, provided a pathway for the Timberwolves to get under the apron next season, which would give them more flexibility to continue building around rising young star Anthony Edwards.

Executives around the league are grappling with the new financial rules that are forcing them to make difficult decisions with All-Star caliber players sooner than they probably would like to, while at the same time making it far more difficult to pull off trades. It played a factor in the Golden State Warriors, historically a team that never blinked at massive luxury tax bills, deciding they could not afford to keep Klay Thompson, one of the most beloved players in franchise history. Thompson signed with the Dallas Mavericks in free agency.

It is why the LA Clippers, even with owner Steve Ballmer’s bottomless pockets, would not give All-Star Paul George the long-term contract he wanted and allowed him to head to Philadelphia.

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

If a team decides it needs to make a deal for competitive or financial reasons, it becomes a lot more difficult to pull off. Teams are over the second apron — set this season at $188.9 million — cannot aggregate players to send out in trades and have to make the salaries from both sides in the deal match as opposed to non-apron teams, who can have the salaries within 25 percent of each other. They cannot use cash to help facilitate a trade and cannot trade a first-round pick seven years in the future.

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

Second apron teams also cannot use the midlevel exception in free agency. If a team is above the second apron in two out of four years, its first-round pick from seven years out is automatically moved down to the bottom of the board. These stipulations reduce the margin of error for general managers who have always had one eye on the present-day roster and the other looking off into the future.

“It’s not that you have to hit a home run on every deal,” one of the executives said. “But every deal precipitates some other decision now as you get closer and closer to the aprons because they just start taking stuff away for you to be able to do it. So you’ve got to get the initial moves right.”

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

“What I’m hearing from teams, even as the second apron is moving to kick in, the teams are realizing there are real teeth in those provisions,” Silver said at the Board of Governors meeting at the Las Vegas Summer League.

The Timberwolves and Knicks learned how difficult dealmaking is when trying to execute the Towns trade. The Wolves are above the second apron, so the Knicks had to go through a labyrinth of maneuvers to make all of the money work, including signing a player from overseas and trading him to the Charlotte Hornets.

It is a deal that could not have been made during the regular season because players can only be signed and traded during the offseason, another pressure point that made it important for Minnesota to get it done before camp opened.

“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 anyone intended it to be this challenging to make moves, make trades when you’re above certain aprons.”

Watching Thompson leave was gut-wrenching for Golden State. He won four championships with Steph Curry and Draymond Green, a trio that was supposed to stay together to the end. But the Warriors devoted more resources to younger players in recent seasons as Thompson worked his way back from two major injuries, giving big money to Andrew Wiggins and Jordan Poole and signing Curry and Green to extensions. That did not sit well with Thompson, who signed a three-year, $50 million contract in a sign-and-trade deal with the Mavericks.

On a smaller scale, the Denver Nuggets have had to say goodbye to key role players Bruce Brown and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope in consecutive years after winning the title in 2023. The Timberwolves also watched Kyle Anderson, one of Finch’s favorites, leave for Golden State because he was too expensive.

Watching the Clippers hold the line on George was almost as stunning as seeing Thompson hold up a Mavericks jersey at his introductory news conference. Ballmer has been one of the most aggressive spenders in the league since he took over the Clippers in 2014. But all of these new rules are turning him into a more pragmatic 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 also going to have flexibility in the long term that is going to make this a sustainable organization that’s always in pursuit of winning championships.”

The Celtics are bringing everyone back after winning the championship last season, but even the chance to be potentially one of the league’s last dynasties is making stomachs queasy in Boston. The Celtics will eventually have to make some hard decisions about a core that includes Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porziņģis, and it appears owner Wyc Grousbeck will leave those decisions up to someone else after putting up for sale his majority ownership stake in the franchise.

“When you’re me and you’re told that if you have a $75 million tax bill, we better be having a parade, you need to make hard decisions,” one general manager said. “Teams that enter into the repeater, it makes putting a championship quality roster together a lot more challenging.”

Even teams that are not approaching the tax aprons are having to adjust. There was a time when those teams were fertile ground for dealmaking, often using their cap space to take on draft picks from playoff hopefuls looking to augment their roster. But the apron restrictions on trades, including the requirement that deals match almost dollar for dollar, can make it exceedingly difficult for rebuilding teams to find landing spots with contenders for players who are not in their long-term plans.

The choices are getting more and more difficult.

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

Whether that pain comes from paying through the nose for a star-studded roster or from having to stomach losing a lot of the avenues a team can take to adjust its roster in the future, these next few years could be a little bit rocky while everyone adjusts.

Not everyone is blinking just yet. The Phoenix Suns are going to have a roster that costs well over $400 million this season when the luxury tax is factored in, with new owner Mat Ishbia going all in to chase a title. Philadelphia was able to add George to its core of Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey to finally break through in the Eastern Conference.

As daunting as the new landscape may be, some executives view it as just another puzzle for them to solve.

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

The Knicks were able to do just that with the Towns deal, signing three players they never had any intention of playing to contracts $1 over the league minimum to help them sneak past some of the restrictions. There will be other methods cap-savvy teams will discover along the way. In the meantime, business as usual in the NBA will look a lot different.

That much was clear for Towns on Sunday when he faced his former team 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 is going to just keep going,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how you feel. It doesn’t matter how life is treating you. You got to come here ready every day. Put your city on the map and do the best you can for your teammates and your organization.”

(Illustration: Meech Robinson: The Athletic; Photos of Klay Thompson, Karl-Anthony Towns, Paul George, Julius Randle / Getty Images)