Q&A with Karl-Anthony Towns: Rookie of the Year Favorite Talks Thibs and More

Karl-Anthony Towns just finished one of the greatest rookie seasons in modern NBA history. Whenever the voting results are announced, Towns is likely to run away with the Rookie of the Year Award, if not win it unanimously.

Taken with the No. 1 overall pick in the 2015 NBA draft by the Minnesota Timberwolves, Towns averaged 18.3 points, 10.4 rebounds, 2.0 assists and 1.7 blocks per game on his way to a 22.5 player efficiency rating (PER), the seventh-highest for any rookie since the ABA-NBA merger in 1976. 

He wasn’t just the league’s best rookie during the 2015-16 season; he was already one of its best overall players—the rare first-year player to establish himself as a legitimate two-way star. At 20 years old, he’s already on the cusp of superstar-level production. By next season, Towns could be a top-10 player in the NBA.

He’s that talented, and his team just hired a coach—former Chicago Bulls head coach Tom Thibodeau—who should push him to new heights on both sides of the ball. 

Towns recently sat down with Bleacher Report to discuss Thibodeau, apprenticing under Kevin Garnett, why so many future NBA stars choose to go to Kentucky, his imaginary friend, Karlito—who has his own bobblehead—and more. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our chat. 

Bleacher Report: Something that seems likely to be relegated to a footnote by the time your career is over, especially because of who your next coach is, is that Sam Mitchell was your coach as a rookie. Just as an example, few people would remember Paul Silas coached LeBron for the first year and a half of his career. What’s something you learned from Sam’s coaching this year that you’ll carry with you for the rest of your career?

Karl-Anthony Towns: Sam Mitchell really taught me how to be a professional. I came in with a great mindset, a great mentality about the game of basketball, how to conduct myself; and Coach [John] Calipari did that. But it’s different when you come in the league, him teaching me how to do certain things: how to talk to people, how to talk to officials, how to do this and that. He taught me so much about how to be an NBA professional. Him coaching me, being a former player, it had a huge effect on me. It allowed me to have a much easier transition into the role that I was given.

B/R: There were a couple of things he took heat for throughout the year. Early in the season, you weren’t playing as much, weren’t playing in crunch time. Zach LaVine was playing off the bench as a backup point guard rather than next to Ricky Rubio. But then by the end of the season, when you guys were all starting together along with Andrew Wiggins, you kind of took off a little bit, showed us flashes of what we all expect to see over the next five to 10 years. Do you think that early-season strategy helped you reach the level you reached both personally and as a team over the second half of the season?

KAT: Everything has a reason. We did that, and at the end of the day, like he said, he didn’t want to wear me out. You don’t want to wear me out. As a rookie, you’ve got to take extra precautions. Who knew I was going to play 82 straight games and not get injured and have a setback or anything? You’ve got to prepare for things even when they’re not happening yet. It’s just like an alarm system. You buy an alarm system before an accident happens and after it, you’re happy. It’s one of those things. Everything had a purpose. I fully trusted him, fully believed in him, fully bought into what he said. And whatever he said, it went. 

B/R: The workload thing lets us transition to your next coach pretty nicely. Tom Thibodeau, he rides his top guys for a lot of minutes. And it’s not …

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