The Most Confusing Teams in the NBA!

The Knicks have tabled contract extension talks with Karl-Anthony Towns, Josh Hart, and Deuce McBride, and Zach Lowe is not buying the rationale. “If James Dolan is mad at anything that Karl-Anthony Towns or Josh Hart said… tabling extensions feels like a little bit of a tantrum and a negotiating play,” Lowe says on his annual “five most confusing teams” episode with Rob Mahoney. “All Karl-Anthony Towns did was very calmly and very factually answer a question that was posed to him at Media Day… If that triggered anything, then people need to buck up a little bit.”

The episode, a preseason tour of the league’s most inscrutable rosters, uses the Knicks news as a springboard into a broader discussion of which teams are hardest to project—and why.

The Knicks’ second-apron posturing

The Knicks’ decision to pause extensions is less about basketball logic than about ownership messaging, Lowe argues. Towns’s camp is reportedly proposing a fair deal, not a preposterous one, and there are plausible paths to keeping Towns, Hart, and OG Anunoby under the second apron. The real issue, Lowe says, is that owners love to “put up this boogeyman and hide behind it” when they don’t want to spend. “I’m especially over it when the team that just proved they were the best team in the league is crying poor,” he says. “Just pay the guys to bring back a proper title defense.”