Why Raptors shouldn’t trade Quickley ahead of the deadline
Immanuel Quickley’s up-and-down play so far this season has been immensely divisive. There are sensible cases both for and against the sharpshooting guard. His pull-up 3-point shooting provides an oasis on a team otherwise barren. But his lack of ability to access dangerous areas of the court with his dribble and create for others from the lead guard spot are both troubling and emblematic of greater issues that plague the team’s offence as a whole.
Yet, despite his shortcomings in important areas, the Raptors can’t trade Quickley. They shouldn’t. At least certainly not yet. And that isn’t because he breathed white-hot fire last week en route to the most efficient 40-ball in league history and a first career Eastern Conference Player of the Week award.
Well, this outburst is indicative of why he shouldn’t be trade fodder as we approach the Feb. 5 deadline. But it isn’t because Quickley’s miraculous surge has suddenly made him indispensable to the Raptors. Even though in some ways he is indispensable to the Raptors. This is starting to sound like Anton Chigurh’s lucky coin “don’t put it in your pocket, or it will get mixed in with the others and become just a coin … which it is” speech. Let me explain.
Quickley’s always been essential to the Raptors’ offence, even while he was slumping and despite his limitations. The heater was simply his world-class shot making coming around in a big way. Shooting variance giveth and taketh away. At the same time, his contract is a little rich for an off-ball shooting threat that isn’t able to create. Too rich for four games to fix, no matter how sensational.
Friend of Raptors Republic and brilliant basketball writer Joe Wolfond wrote a great piece last week, The Quickley Quandary, and in it he provided a perfect summation of why now is the wrong time to move him:
“The way I see it, a player becomes a good trade candidate when he has more value to other teams than he does to the team he plays for, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a team for whom Quickley would supply more value than he brings to Toronto right now.”
Not only are the Raptors bottom-seven in both 3-point volume and accuracy, they’re dead last in pull-up three attempts for a second straight season. And Quickley is the only one pulling up from beyond the arc with any regularity, taking well over a third of Toronto’s deep pulls and attempting almost double anyone else on the roster.
The Raptors simply cannot afford to lose their best 3-point shooter. If anything they need more shooting. And while he isn’t by percentage, don’t get it wrong, Quickley is Toronto’s best sniper. He’s the only true movement shooter on the team. Flying around screens and pulling off the dribble is much harder than spotting up for a catch-and-shoot.
Who is one of the best high-volume pull-up 3-point shooters more valuable to than the team who attempts the fewest and makes them at the third-worst rate?
Wolfond proceeded to opine that the Raptors should be patient and see if they can get more out of Quickley. Raptors Republic’s Pull Up Tre podcast expressed a similar sentiment before Quickley caught fire: Why trade a player when their value’s low? His shooting wasn’t going to stay at 34.6 percent forever; it was bound to at least normalize somewhere closer to his career average of 37.4 percent.
Then Quickley’s efficiency did exactly that, sharply snapping back to 36.8 percent on the back of a 16-of-26 (61.5 percent) stretch over one week. It’s been a tremendous all-around run. He’s also grabbed 6.8 rebounds over that span, including 11 in an Oklahoma City Thunder-toppling effort on Sunday. Quickley’s listed at six-foot-two, but seems a little bigger to me, and regardless he’s been able to punch up on the glass at a time when the Raptors have needed it most without Jakob Poeltl and Collin Murray-Boyles. He’s been battling. Quickley’s also showed more toughness attacking the paint and drawing contact. He averaged five free throw attempts per game last week compared to 3.1 previously. The off-ball defence has popped a little more of late too.
Quickley’s issues with picking up his dribble, not taking drives deep and failing to make reads from the middle still persist. But they have improved marginally. Our own Louis Zatzman wrote a fantastic piece at the end of last season that delved into Quickley’s shortcomings as a playmaker – he had only five assists from the paint that resulted in dunks or layups.
This season that number’s gone up. I haven’t actually gone through all of the assists but just keeping a mental counter it’s at least somewhere between double or triple that number, if not higher. Nothing earth-shattering, but small, incremental progress.
Still, the new hardware and recent upwards trajectory will be too little too late when it comes to sweetening Quickley’s deal for opposing front offices. There’s only eight days until the deadline. The sample’s too small, the guaranteed money too large.
The Raptors paid Quickley like their point guard of the future, and so far he’s mostly been a gunner. And it won’t be long until we’re dropping the “so far” from that sentence. That doesn’t mean Quickley isn’t valuable, in Toronto or elsewhere. And that value will only grow as the cap increases around his flat contract. If he keeps shooting the lights that’ll help too. But for now his exceptional shot-making is most needed north of the border.
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