The Raptors fell apart in Quickley’s return, but Quickley was solid

If a 15-32 basketball team can have an important game, this was it for the Toronto Raptors. Not because of the opponent, no, the Chicago Bulls are the definition of replaceable when it comes to opponents. But because the Raptors, 7-1 over their last eight games, and entering the contest a proud owner of a five-game winning streak — the tied-longest in the NBA — were about to find out how well their newly winning ways fit with their newly returned would-be star point guard, Immanuel Quickley. 

Toronto forced its way back into relevance (again, insofar as a 15-32 basketball team can be relevant) through defence. Toronto had the number-one defence in the league for two weeks straight — and by an enormous margin, with the gap between Toronto and second-place larger than the gap between second-place and 12th-place. The Raptors have been enormously physical, with everyone playing on a string, and the entire defence funneling the ball to twin towers Scottie Barnes and Jakob Poeltl inside the arc. It has worked. 

Quickley is not enormously physical. Though he spent many years as a member of a strong defence with the New York Knicks, he has never been a lockdown defender. Toronto’s defence has largely been disastrous with Quickley on the floor so far this year, 6.8 points per 100 possessions worse than with him on the bench. 

How would the team’s new identity meld with the team’s returning lead guard? 

It turned out, fairly well. 

Offensively, Quickley provided the shooting punch that the Raptors have sorely lacked. Even if Toronto’s defence has been ferocious, fantastic, fanged, the offence has remained a chore. (Twenty-second over the last two weeks.) Quickley sharpened the knife. And he did it without commandeering much of anything. 

First, Quickly tipped an offensive rebound to himself, stepped into a pull-up triple. Then he hit a floater in transition. Later, after Barnes drew a double-team in the post, and the ball whirred around the perimeter before finding Quiclkley, and he pump-faked, side-stepped, and drilled another triple. That’s how to feast on the carcass rather than getting the kill yourself. That’s fitting in, leaving initiation to others. 

Of course, that’s the side of the ball that could be called Quickley’s speciality. Perhaps there were small twinges of worry about how he’d fit into the offence — there have been moments of poor fit there, with him sometimes holding the ball and killing offensive momentum, picking up his dribble on drives, or passing up good looks. But those were minimal issues, likely due to his own irregular rhythm due to injury. He has also had moments of tremendous offensive impact. The real question was how Quickley would fit in on defence. 

That, too, turned out fairly well. 

The best moment came in transition. Poeltl threw a pass to Quickley just as Quickley started to cut to the rim, and the ball flew down the court for Chicago’s Coby White to pick it up with an uncontested lane to the rim. But Quickley chased him down with a fantastic swipe on the ball to prevent a sure thing. But best moments don’t define us, and neither did they define Quickley’s game. He mostly just fit in, invisible in a good way. 

Quickley rotated well, closed out well, even fought well in battling on the glass. He could have done more off the ball to dig down on drives that angled past him, but that’s nitpicking a player who just returned from injury. No one ever thought Quickley was going to drive an excellent defence, to do the heavy lifting. And he didn’t against Chicago. But the expectation is at least for him to fit in on an otherwise solid defence. And that happened. 

It is significant that Davion Mitchell, who has been one of Toronto’s major minutes winners during the last few weeks, lost his minutes while Quickley won his. (Quickley finished with Toronto’s best plus-minus in the game.) And Mitchell played his usual splendid defence. He chipped in on offence and hit his jumpers. The differential in plus-minus was not due to Mitchell’s poor output, but Quickley’s positives. 

Chicago was able to score more points than most of Toronto opponents have managed in recent weeks. That wasn’t due to poor defence (at least, for most of the game), at least outside of a sloppy stretch in the latter half of the third quarter. Mostly Chicago’s shooters hit difficult triples. The Bulls outshot Toronto from deep, with even poor shooters connecting. They ran clean actions. They executed. That’s life sometimes in the NBA. At first, the Raptors didn’t let it bother them and kept fighting. But in the third quarter they let go of the rope, and Chicago bought itself some distance. The Bulls found some easy ones while Toronto’s offence ran dry. (That happened, by the way, with Quickley on the bench.) 

The Raptors are beyond encouraging losses, particularly given their winning streak coming into the game. If anything, this was a frustrating loss. (If you want to watch watchable basketball. If you want Raptor losses for a high draft pick, then this one probably hit just right.) But the frustrations didn’t stem from Quickley. 

Outside of Mitchell and Ja’Kobe Walter, the Raptors got very little off the bench — which had been a strength for the Raptors during the winning streak. (It probably contributed that Darko Rajakovic chose not to play some of his veterans, including Kelly Olynyk and Chris Boucher, while giving Bruce Brown fewer minutes than was standard during the streak.) Outside of a few fadeaway jumpers from the post, Barnes’ scoring mostly didn’t hit the road running. Everyone seemed to miss layups. Gradey Dick’s scoring punch was entirely absent. There was plenty about which to be frustrated. But Quickley was relatively immaculate. 

Perhaps it is a reasonable criticism that Quickley should have been more involved. He was limited in his minutes, of course, but it’s not like he dominated the ball in his time on the court. Perhaps rather than subsisting like a hyena on offence, he should have been the lion, should have roused himself to initiate the hunt. But for a player who appeared in only his 10th game of the season, and his first after missing eight straight, I tend towards appreciating his fitting in rather than fitting out. Appreciating him doing too little rather than trying to do too much. 

And so Toronto saw its winning streak come to an end. It was always going to at some point. That the Raptors managed to scrape and claw five in a row is something of a miracle considering how poor this team’s play has been for the majority of the season. The streak is over, and it coincided with Quickley’s return. Toronto lost its most important game to this point of the season. But don’t blame Quickley. On a night when the majority of the team disappointed, Quickley was mostly impressive. In a season during which finding silver linings have mostly required a microscope, it is at least a relief that this one came readymade and self-evident.

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