For the New York Knicks, this was the mandate and the margin.

Towns and his new Knicks teammates will see his old team, the Minnesota Timberwolves, Sunday (6 p.m. ET on ESPN) in what has become one of the most interesting games of the preseason. The machinations that decided which uniform Towns would be wearing are deeply nuanced and endlessly interesting.

Acquiring Towns was a blockbuster. What the Knicks did to actually make it happen was a saga.

That’s where the $300,000 comes in. That is how much space the Knicks will have below the unbreakable barrier known as the “second apron” once they fill out their roster at the end of the preseason, league sources told ESPN (because they aggregated salaries in the trades to acquire Towns and Mikal Bridges, they are not allowed to exceed the second apron at any point this season). This is roughly 0.2% of their $189 million payroll this season, by NBA contract standards a rounding figure. But what a dance to get there.

“It’s been great execution of a plan. It’s five years in the making,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said. “It’s accumulating the draft capital, and looking at the opportunities and going step by step and figuring out the things you can do.”

Like this:

• In 2021, the Knicks signed Jalen Brunson to a contract that descended over the first three seasons. Even though he signed a new four-year, $156 million deal that will begin in 2025, Brunson’s contract declined by $1.3 million from last season to this season.

• In 2022, the Knicks signed Mitchell Robinson to a contract that descended over the four years of the deal. Robinson’s salary declined $1.3 million from last season to this season.

• In June, the Knicks declined to extend center Precious Achiuwa a qualifying offer of $6.3 million, which would have made him a restricted free agent. Instead, they allowed him to enter unrestricted free agency. Then, a month later, they signed him to a contract for $6 million to be their backup center. It saved $300,000 in cap space over what he would’ve cost them if they’d extended the qualifying offer and he’d signed it.

• The Knicks started draft night with two first-round picks, Nos. 24 and 25. They then made six draft night trades, ultimately ending up with picks No. 25 and No. 34 in addition to a handful of other second-rounders, most of them for future drafts.

• Their first-round pick, Pacome Dadiet, signed a contract at 80% of his preassigned salary slot for the first year, which is allowed by rule. Their second-round pick, Tyler Kolek, signed for $800,000 less than the 24th pick’s salary slot. These maneuvers saved the Knicks $1.3 million in cap space for this season.

• The Knicks signed-and-traded three players — Charlie Brown Jr., DaQuan Jeffries and Duane Washington Jr. — to the Charlotte Hornets to make the deal work under the apron rules Minnesota and New York had to deal with. The Knicks signed them to contracts totaling $6.8 million to make the trade workable. Then they used the $7.2 million NBA teams are allowed to send out in trades per year and sent it to Charlotte, covering the cost of the players with the Hornets making $400,000 profit plus three second-round picks. The Knicks were only allowed to sign-and-trade Jeffries because they’d signed him to a rest-of-season contract (after two 10-day contracts) on March 25. Washington and Brown both ended last season with the Knicks on two-way deals, making them sign-and-trade eligible.

Without every single one of these moves, the Knicks would not have been able to make the Towns trade. All of it together made it happen. Some of them, such as the rare triple sign-and-trade, were for Towns. Others, like the contract structures for Brunson and Robinson, were put in place just in case something like this was needed.

Knicks president Leon Rose, who was obsessed with acquiring Towns, went down a similar path with a previous offseason obsession: getting Brunson in 2021. A former client from his agent days like Towns, Brunson was a target of the Knicks for months and they made a series of deals around the draft that year to clear off $30 million from their books to open the cap space to sign Brunson outright.

The Dallas Mavericks, Brunson’s old team, were sufficiently caught off guard in losing him without a chance to match or trade. They later filed tampering charges against the Knicks after seeing the symphony end with Brunson agreeing to terms at the very start of free agency (the Knicks were docked a second-round pick in the 2025 draft as a result of that tampering investigation).

If that was graduate-level front office work, the maneuvers to land Towns, who Rose says could be his other cornerstone, were a thesis.

The nuts and bolts were largely performed by Knicks vice president of strategic planning Brock Aller, who has a long history of making multistep complex deals dating to his days in the Cleveland Cavaliers’ front office. Aller handles much of the strategic moves for the Knicks and does most of the complex trade negotiations.

“Brock has been terrific,” said Thibodeau, who previously ran the Timberwolves’ front office. “And it’s not easy. It’s your immediate plan and also your future plan. You have to look at it in almost three different ways. There’s the basketball standpoint, what does it mean for what’s on the floor? Then there’s the financial impact. Then there’s also the penalty aspect that you have to look at as well. So all three things before you make a decision you have to dig deep on. So they’ve done a great job.”

Towns knew Rose was interested in getting him but he didn’t think the Knicks could pull it off, not after his salary jumped by $13 million starting July 1 as his supermax contract extension signed in 2022 kicked in. Or after the Knicks triggered a series of trade restrictions once they made another massive deal, landing Mikal Bridges, in June.

“I was shocked,” Towns said. “Maybe the word flabbergasted is more correct.”

So was much of the rest of the NBA. But Rose, Aller and the rest of the Knicks’ front office, including vice president Gersson Rosas, who helped put the big trade with his former team together, can only do so much. The players are aware the serious business is still in their hands.

“[Brock] does a great job on his part,” Brunson said. “We applaud him for it, and we’ve just got to go out there and do our part on the floor.”

LOS ANGELES — After scoring at least 35 points in his second consecutive game to open the season, leading Los Angeles to a 123-116 win over the Phoenix Suns and a 2-0 record, Anthony Davis was asked if he could name the two other Lakers greats to match his scorching start.

It took him six errant guesses — Kobe Bryant, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaquille O’Neal, James Worthy and LeBron James — before he got one right.

“Jerry West?” Davis asked, correctly naming the Hall of Famer who opened the 1969-70 season with 39 points in his first game and 42 in his second.

James, standing at his locker next to Davis, helped out the big man with an assist on identifying the other.

“Elgin,” James said.

“Elgin Baylor,” Davis continued, mentioning the forward who started the 1962-63 season with 71 points in his first two games, which matches Davis’ total.

It has been an eye-opening launch for Davis, who at age 31 and in his 13th NBA season and sixth with the Lakers, finally appears positioned to take the torch as the team’s best player.

“It’s very important that he’s the main focal point for us every single night,” James, 39, said after finishing with 21 points and eight assists. “We know what he’s going to do defensively, but offensively we have to find him in multiple places on the floor throughout the whole game. And we’ve done that through two games.”

James, a 22-year veteran, isn’t exactly admitting he is slowing down, however. Look no further than his answer to being asked if he would play Saturday on the second night of a back-to-back against the Sacramento Kings as evidence.

“I plan on playing every game [this season],” James said. “We’ll see what happens if I don’t.”

The Lakers clawed back from an early 22-point deficit against the Suns, with Davis, James and Austin Reaves (26 points, 8 assists, 3 steals) leading the charge.

“What he’s been doing is kind of, it’s unreal, obviously, but I expect him to go dominate the game in many facets,” Reaves said of Davis. “I’m just lucky to have him as a teammate.”

And Lakers fans, it would appear, should feel fortunate to have JJ Redick as their coach.

One would have to rattle off as many names as Davis did — Darvin Ham, Frank Vogel, Luke Walton, Byron Scott, Mike D’Antoni and Mike Brown — before mentioning the last coach to lead the franchise to a 2-0 start: Phil Jackson in 2010-11.

Redick, like the rest of the team, passed on the credit to Davis too.

“There’s an intentionality to have [Davis] involved as much as possible,” Redick said. “We recognize what type of player he is and that he can create mismatches. … There’s a comfort level and a confidence level that he has that, if the game starts getting wacky, he knows the ball is going to come back to him. … The ball is going to find him.”