A Whole Lot of NBA GMs Would Start a Franchise With Karl-Anthony Towns Over Anybody Else

If you were the general manager of an NBA team and you had to pick one current player to start a franchise with today, who would it be? LeBron James, even though he’s 31? Steph Curry, even though he’s thrived in the Warriors’ system and might not be the same player elsewhere? Kevin Durant, even though he just left one team to join a different one to give himself a better chance to win a title? Anthony Davis, even though he can’t seem to stay healthy for long stretches of time?

NBA.com poses this question to all 30 NBA GMs before the start of every season, and while most of them picked Davis last season, it seems GMs have fallen in love with a new young player this year. Davis still received a few votes, but almost 50 percent of the GMs polled revealed that they would much rather start a franchise with…

Karl-Anthony Towns. He received 48.3 percent of the GM votes, while KD received 20.7 percent and LeBron James received 17.2 percent. Curry, Davis, Kawhi Leonard, and Russell Westbrook also received some consideration, but ultimately, Towns was the clear winner.

NBA GMs provided some other surprising answers, too. While Westbrook is considered the favorite to win the NBA MVP award this season—at least in Las Vegas—more than 46 percent of GMs picked LeBron to win it. More than 63 percent picked Curry as the best point guard in the NBA, which isn’t that surprising except that he beat out Chris Paul (20 percent), Westbrook (10 percent), and Kyrie Irving (6.7 percent) by a really large margin. And somehow, 20 percent of NBA GMs answered the question "Which one-player acquisition will make the biggest impact?" with a response other than "KD to the Warriors," which is just…what?

You can check out the entire 2016 NBA GMs poll here.