Did Immanuel Quickley’s Playoff Performance Cost Him A $100 Million Contract?

The third season for an NBA player is a big one for a number of reasons. It’s the expected year of growth into a meaningful contributor with the contributions depending on the expectations of what kind of player they’ll be. It’s the expected year of reliability from a coaching perspective. It’s also the year that they can get paid.

Teams will try to avoid letting their own players go into restricted free agency after their rookie contract, which means that they have to be proactive in willingly extending their draft picks after the third season. That leads to a lot of analysis surrounding that third year of a player.

Immanuel Quickley had a regular season that would naturally raise the expectations of what he was assumed to get a year ago. But things can change in an instant. The timing of expectations is everything and the postseason can reveal all. Was the poor postseason of Quickley enough to give the Knicks cold feet in coughing over a contract that exceeds $100 million?

The Good

Quickley was struggling. The first two months of the season he was unable to gain any traction and the rumor mill started to swirl. The third year guard was not the vivacious young’un that had ended the previous season on a high note. His placement on the team felt clunky and the shot wasn’t falling– it felt as if the team had run its course on the season and on him.

The stats backed it up. He was averaging just a shade over 9 points per game and a true shooting percentage that barely eclipsed .500. The defense was showing signs of growth, but his offense was not providing the spark that the bench needed. The typical impact of Quickley throughout his career had been the on-off numbers, but even that was taking a dip as that figure sat in the negatives with his time on the court. You couldn’t point to much that was working.

Something changed with the team and Quickley once the calendar turned to December. A lot of coverage has surrounded the improved defense, the shifting of the rotation and the superb play of Jalen Brunson and Julius Randle. This is the point in time in which Quickley became the unequivocal 3rd best player on the team.

The impact metrics painted him as a star by season’s end– he ranked in the 88th percentile in estimated plus-minus, which is one of the in vogue stats of the NBA community. RAPTOR and LEBRON, other statistics that measure impact, liked Quickley even more by putting him in the 90th percentile among players in the NBA. The numbers account for the season as a whole, which shows how amazingly Quickley played over the last few months.

The counting stats weren’t shabby, either. The former Kentucky Wildcat averaged 17 points per game over the last five months of the season while shooting nearly 39 percent on his 3-point attempts. He had the best assist/turnover ratio on the team during that stretch with a net rating of 6.9, which would have ranked as the best among teams in the NBA. He nearly doubled his shot attempts per game while pumping up his efficiency to the second best mark on the team. The Knicks don’t reach 47 wins without him and they certainly don’t sustain a top-3 offense, either.

The Bad

The playoffs were not a pretty picture for Quickley.

He seemed out of sorts from the get-go in the New York Knicks matchup against the Cleveland Cavaliers. He played 24 total minutes, but he had some uncharacteristic turnovers during his time in the first game. The three turnovers and zero made field goals were a surprise that seemed to indicate nerves, but it was only a game. Stuff happens in the first game in the playoffs to a young player.

The blowout of game two gave a false sense of how he would fare during the rest of the playoffs. The guard scored 10 of his 12 points in the fourth quarter in a game where they trailed by more than 20 points entering the period. Of course you could point to this being part of what led to him having his best game of the postseason during the first night of playoff basketball at Madison Square Garden. This is where Quickley posted over 10 points and hit four of his six shots from the floor. It would be the only game in the playoffs that he shot over 50 percent from the floor.

The ball handling became exploitable along with his inability to generate his own shot. The game seemed fast for Quickley in both series which raised the question of whether he could be an indispensable part of a team that makes a run in the playoffs. The question is fair and warrants discussion. It is part of the calculation that the team will have to make as the extension looms over the front office’s decision making this summer.

The fact that he can play on both ends of the court makes him more coveted, but does it change if he plays as a key cog off of the bench versus being a fixture in the starting lineup? Quickley referenced his desire to start at some point in his career. The team will have to pay him as such if they want to retain his services.

When we look back at his deal it’ll be interesting to wonder whether the playoffs were a mere footnote in an excellent season or a serious driver of hitting on the low end of his expected contract figure.