The Knicks shocked everyone by pulling off a trade for Karl-Anthony Towns in exchange for Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo at the start of October, and that has transformed both teams. Towns was coming off an up-and-down playoff performance and there was plenty of debate about how good he really was,

Just a month into the offseason, though, that dominant core took a massive change. Two months later, that strong core had all but disappeared.

It sucks,” Randle said. “I guess we’ll never know what could’ve been. I think the more unfortunate part is everything was a build, a constant build — I feel like all our teams overachieved year