Cloud 9

On the shoulders of Immanuel Quickley, New York's magic carpet ride continued.

Goooooooooooooooooooooooooooood MOR-ning (But an especially good morning to anyone who was the 25th pick in the 2020 NBA Draft)!

Game Recap: Knicks 131, C’s 129 (2OT)

⌚️60 Seconds or Less: Distilling what might have been the NBA’s game of the year into a few paragraphs is akin to summarizing War & Peace on an index card, but here goes…

Without Jalen Brunson, who missed this game with a sore foot, New York rode an extremely efficient RJ Barrett early on to stay neck and neck with Boston and a hot-shooting Jayson Tatum. The Knicks fell behind by seven early in the second, but that’s when spot-starter Immanuel Quickley took the reins and helped put the road team in front before a late push gave the Celtics a seven-point halftime advantage. The lead eventually doubled midway through the third, but that’s when the IQ show truly began.

Quickley scored 11 points over the rest of the quarter, and after a contested Randle 3-pointer as the clock hit all zeroes, the Knicks carried a one-point lead into the fourth. Their run continued to open the final frame, and with 8:33 to go, New York went up by 11 to cap a 37-12 run. The C’s showed pride though and fought back to tie it with three minutes remaining as Julius failed to anticipate a few well-timed double teams, but the Knicks had a counterpunch in them as well, and went up by seven on a Randle step-back three with 1:25 remaining.

From there, it was near disaster. Consecutive threes, the second by Marcus Smart following two Boston offensive rebounds, brought the Celtics within one with 19.1 seconds remaining. Two Julius free throws put the lead at three, but Quentin Grimes fouled Jaylen Brown for an and-one, and with a chance to win, Randle had the ball stolen before he could get off an attempt. The first overtime was a slog, but Boston still went ahead by two on an Al Horford’s sixth three of the night. New York needed a bucket to keep the game going, and got one from the man of the hour:

After RJ defended a game-tying attempt on a Tatum drive well, we went to double overtime, where Immanuel Quickley scored the first seven points and put New York in command. Even so, Boston had a chance to win it as time expired, but Horford missed a 3-point attempt from the corner.

The streak continues.

📈 Standings Check-In: With two more gritty wins and nine consecutive victories overall, the Knicks are now one victory short of 40 for the season. That total would join them with only the Denver Nuggets and the top four teams in the East. Currently, here’s where things stand:

Tomorrow: Boston travels to Cleveland and Atlanta is in Miami.

On Tuesday, New York hosts Charlotte before heading out West for a four-game trip.

📸 Play of the Game: With all due respect to the plethora of ginormous shots that Immanuel Quickley and the rest of the Knicks made down the stretch of regulation and both overtimes, there was no real competition for this one:

We are all witnesses.

🐦 Tweets of the Night: The vibes…the vibes…

Knicks Videos @sny_knicks

Jalen Brunson is just like me fr

Well deserved for the guy who became just the fourth Knick since 2000 to play at least 55 minutes in a game and who didn’t sit after halftime.

💫 Stars of the Weekend 💫

I swear, I’m going to start outsourcing the distribution of these things to a third party service. I simply don’t have the wherewithal to split these stars between two players who arguably had the best games of their careers in the two best wins of New York’s season, and then figure out how to honor everyone else who was instrumental to the Knicks’ success vs Miami and Boston as well.

Alas, here we go…

⭐️ Jalen Brunson: That’s right. Brunson, despite missing the Celtics game with a sore left foot that Tom Thibodeau did not think was serious when he spoke about it pregame on Sunday night, gets the nod.

Who should be most aggrieved? RJ Barrett probably has the best argument. He had 29 points on 22 shots in Boston, including 14 early ones on 5-of-6 shooting out of the gate to help set the tone for his undermanned team. His defense in both games was also strong. An extremely solid weekend for RJ, while Mitchell Robinson (13 & 14 last night; he was a monster with seven offensive boards) and Josh Hart (who did a ton of absolutely necessary Josh Hart things in both games, and nailed a massive game-tying triple midway through the first OT in Boston) also have strong arguments. The fact is, when a team is playing better than anyone in the league - and they are - some outstanding performances won’t get honored with only three spots to divvy up.

That’s especially true when you witness the sort of grit and toughness we saw from Brunson on Friday night.

It’s fitting that Jalen twisted his right ankle while successfully contesting a Jimmy Butler fast break dunk attempt - a play between perhaps the two league leaders at getting the absolute most out of what God gave them. Brunson was hobbling bad, and when he left the game late in the third, it wouldn’t have been surprising if he was done for the night.

Nope. Not only was he back with a slight limp about a minute into the fourth, but he proceeded to score eight points on 4-of-6 shooting down the stretch.

One of those buckets put an end to a 9-0 Heat run that felt like it had given them control of the game:

In giving the Knicks the lead back here, Brunson reminded everyone that even at less than 100 percent, he cannot be guarded one-on-one with anything less than All-Defense caliber players (and even then, it’s probably best to send help).

On the very next possession, Brunson drew a switch with Bam Adebayo - who almost certainly will make an All-Defense team this season - and still managed to manipulate the defense into giving up an open dunk for Mitch:

Brunson is the definition of a gamer. He finished with 25 points on 14 shots to go with eight assists and one turnover.

Don’t let last night’s win fool you: he remains the most important Knick on this roster.

⭐️ ⭐️ Julius Randle

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ Immanuel Quickley

Want to know the sort of impact Immanuel Quickley had last night?

Julius Randle, who in a few months is likely going to make his second All-NBA Team, had what I consider to be the best game of his Knick career on Friday night…and he still finishes second to Quickley here.

The fact is, Quick on Sunday was at least as good if not better than Randle was on Friday, and even though Julius finished with 31 points on 22 shots in Boston (including 4-for-4 from the line late in regulation and OT), his game against the Celtics featured a rough close to the fourth quarter and was a notch below what IQ put forth in Miami (21 points on 11 shots; impeccable defense all night long).

I gave Julius all his flowers in a special edition of the newsletter on Saturday, and will have a deep dive on his (very strong) All-NBA chances later this week, so I’m going to give the rest of the space here to the young man who doesn’t seem to give a flying f— about the expectations of those around him.

I’ll preface this by saying first that Leon Rose and Tom Thibodeau deserve votes for this year’s executive and coach of the year, but the fact remains that neither seemed to know what they had in this player as recently as early this season. Thibs watched as starting point guards Kemba Walker and Alec Burks took turns torpedoing New York’s 2021-22 season, all while IQ sat on the bench and watched. Then, this summer, the reporting suggests that the front office was comfortable adding Quick to an RJ-plus-picks package for Donovan Mitchell. After that fell through, they were seemingly all too happy to discuss him in trades in the fall.

Now: is it possible and even likely that the version of Quick we’re seeing wouldn’t have been ready to step into a bigger role last year, and that keeping him in a more diminished capacity actually helped his long term development? Absolutely. By the same token, maybe Leon didn’t have the evidence to suggest that dealing Quickley to Utah would come back to bite him in a big way, nor could he be faulted for exploring trade options with IQ shooting so poorly over the first third of the season¹. It's all fair.

Even so, the fact remains that Quick had every reason to question whether the organization that drafted him still had the requisite belief in his abilities that he deserved. He could have gotten down on himself pretty easily, or worse, taken his frustrations out on the team by selfishly looking to pad his own stats.

Not once did we ever see an ounce of evidence that either was happening.

Instead, Immanuel Quickley got better. A lot better. Over his last 35 games, IQ is averaging 16.7 points on a nearly 50/40/80 slash line. On the season, he’s 17th in the league in total plus/minus, and since the Knicks turned around their season on December 4, he’s 10th. That rise from possible trade candidate to indispensable third banana culminated in last night’s game - one that put Quickley on the map nationally, but for Knicks fans, was a confirmation of what many of us have long believed:

Immanuel Quickley is a star.

If someone told Quickley that he wasn’t supposed to be doing this - taking over a game on national television against one of the best teams in the league that was desperate for a bounce back win - you sure couldn’t tell. If anything, the evidence would seem to suggest that he’s fueled by the doubts of others. That would help explain the turnaround of his season right around when the trade rumors really started to swirl.

Even last night, I know I believed that New York’s streak would end without their leader. The Knicks had withstood Brunson’s absence before, but in Boston, against Tatum going for 40 and Brown putting up 29? Some hills aren’t meant to be climbed.

55 minutes and 38 points later, we’ve been reminded yet again: doubt this young man at your own risk.

We forget that part sometimes - his youth. It’s easy to do so when he’s the one player on the team who never seems to make a mistake on either end of the court. But young he is, 23 years old and in just his third NBA season. Last night, he became the third youngest player ever to post a stat line of at least 38 points, eight rebounds, seven assists, four steals and one or fewer turnovers. Michael Jordan and Isiah Thomas did it at 21. Jordan did it again a few years later, as did Gary Payton and Karl Malone once apiece. None played over 50 minutes in their respective games.

That’s it. Quick’s stat line puts him alongside the greatest player of all time and three of his HOF buddies. If we take away the steals requirement but keep it at 23-or-under, we add LeBron (twice), Chris Webber, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Jayson Tatum and D’Angelo Russell to the list. So a bunch more current and future Hall-of-Famers and a former No. 2 overall pick in the draft.

And yet, that’s not the best part of last night’s announcement to the world. It is this:

Joy. Pure unadulterated joy.

In short, Immanuel Quickley is why we watch sports.

Most of us will never have the faintest idea of what it would be like to play and succeed at the professional level, but in Quickley, we see a player reacting to all of it as we imagine we might if ever given the chance. He is happy to be there, in the best possible way.

And boy, oh boy, are the Knicks happy he’s here as well.

Best regular season win in ages.

On the broad shoulders of a babe.

🏀

That’s it for today! If you enjoy this newsletter and like the Mets, don’t forget to subscribe to JB’s Metropolitan, or his hockey newsletter, Isles Fix. Also, a big thanks to our sponsor:

See y’all soon! #BlackLivesMatter

1. IQ was under 40 percent overall and under 30 percent from deep through 30 games.