The Kristaps Porzingis Trade Helped the Knicks Win the Title

Yes, by trading Kristaps Porzingis to the Dallas Mavericks on Jan. 31, 2019, for Dennis Smith Jr., DeAndre Jordan, Wesley Matthews, and two first-round picks, the New York Knicks gained crucial 2019 cap space. That cap space would be used to sign Julius Randle and Marcus Morris, and the draft picks were used in trades and to draft Quentin Grimes. Those assets later became OG Anunoby and Karl-Anthony Towns, two starters on the 2026 championship team.

In 1961, an MIT meteorologist named Edward Lorenz went to get a cup of coffee and came back to a different reality.

He’d been running a weather simulation on a Royal McBee, a machine crude enough that an hour of processing bought you time to grab some joe. He wanted to re-run part of a sequence he’d already finished, so he grabbed a number off an earlier printout and typed it in. The printout read 0.506. The value sitting in the computer’s memory was 0.506127. Lorenz entered the shorter one on the reasonable assumption that one part in a thousand wouldn’t register.

An hour later, the machine had produced two months of weather bearing no resemblance to the first run. Lorenz suspected a dead vacuum tube, checked, and found the computer working perfectly. The four decimal places he left out had rewritten the atmosphere.

He named it sensitive dependence on initial conditions and published it in 1963 under the title “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow.” The name’s complexity might have been why nobody outside atmospheric science heard about it for a decade. When he was booked to speak at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1972 and failed to turn in a title, a colleague named Philip Merilees invented one for him: “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” Now that was a title people would remember.

Lorenz’s model had no randomness in it anywhere. Feed it the same numbers twice, and it’ll hand back the same weather, every time. Which means the gap between his two runs had exactly one source: the number he judged too small to bother typing in full.

And a butterfly can’t power a tornado. A storm that size pulls its energy from the atmosphere. What a flap can do is tip conditions just enough that the atmosphere builds one storm instead of another, or builds it over Texas instead of Oklahoma.

Keep that top of mind. Everything that happened to the Knicks after they traded KP depends on it.

At 1:44 p.m. on Jan. 31, 2019, Adrian Wojnarowski reported that Kristaps Porzingis had walked into a meeting with Knicks management to air his frustrations about the losing and the direction of the team. By 2:54, KP wanted out. By 3:38, he was a Dallas Maverick. Knicks fans who were at work or in class that afternoon can still tell you where they were standing, and the stories collected in Posting and Toasting’s retrospective show how hard we’ve tried ot forget.

New York sent Porzingis, Tim Hardaway Jr., Courtney Lee, and Trey Burke to Dallas. It got back Dennis Smith Jr., DeAndre Jordan, Wesley Matthews, an unprotected 2021 first-rounder, and a top-10 protected 2023 first-rounder. Around the league, the return read like a giveaway. On WFAN’s “The Bank Shot,” Bob Silverman described calling the KP trade “pennies on the dollar would be generous.”

On June 13, 2026, Jalen Brunson scored 45 points in San Antonio, and the Knicks won their third championship and first since 1973.

Now lets connect both events.