According to Marc Stein, the New York Knicks tried hard to get Walker Kessler from the Utah Jazz before making the trade for Karl-Anthony Towns.

From Stein’s substack:

Before coming to terms on a blockbuster swap with Minnesota for Karl-Anthony Towns mere days before the start of training camp, New York made multiple trade runs at Utah’s Walker Kessler to fill its well-chronicled void at center, league sources say.

It is believed that Utah wanted at least two future first-round picks for Kessler … after the Knicks had exhausted much of their remaining cache of draft picks in the trade with Brooklyn for Bridges.

This is more clarification on the trade rumors we had seen before involving Walker Kessler. Kessler had a very strong rookie season but a disappointing second season where he lost his starting spot to John Collins.

All that said, Kessler still has impressive rim protection numbers and is obviously still very young and there’s no reason he can’t continue to improve.

It’s interesting to see these rumors that are now coming out with the dust now having cleared. It does make sense because, with all these rumors, we learn the asking price for players after the fact. It certainly seems that if a team out there wants a young rim-protecting center, they could have Kessler for two first-round picks. On top of that, it’s clear this was somewhat recent. Will we see more of these offers for Kessler now that other teams are aware of the asking price?