One Down, One to Go?

With Josh Hart's extension done, will Immanuel Quickley be the next to get paid?

Good morning! It’s the middle of August, but it might as well be the middle of May after a weekend full of competitive basketball featuring some of New York’s brightest stars. We’ll cover those performances, plus start a two-day deep dive on a possible Immanuel Quickley extension, all in today’s edition.

🗣️ News & Notes ✍️

🏀 Team USA and Team Canada each played two games this weekend, and New York’s representatives came away as the most impressive performers from their respective squads.

Things kicked off on Saturday, when Jalen Brunson and RJ Barrett scored 11 points apiece in their teams’ easy wins over Slovenia and New Zealand, respectively. Brunson also notched eight assists, including this no look dime on a Cam Johnson triple:

Josh Hart made his debut as well, playing on Steve Kerr’s second unit and notching two points, four rebounds and a nice jump-pass assist on an Austin Reeves three.

It was all an appetizer for yesterday’s main course.

First up was Barrett, whose Canadians found themselves in a dogfight against the Germans. With his team down five in the closing moments, Barrett scored five straight, including this tough bucket to send the game to OT:

In overtime, RJ added another six points and led Team Canada to a come from behind win. His final line: 31 points on 13-of-14 shooting, including a perfect 4-for-4 from deep. It was the best international performance from a Knick in quite some time - a title Barrett would retain for all of about two hours.

That’s because Jalen Brunson came out later Sunday afternoon and shot a perfect 9-for-9 in Team USA’s win against the top-ranked Spaniards. He finished with 22 points and five dimes in a game that was a dogfight until the United States pulled away in the fourth.

On a team featuring some of the brightest talent in the league, Brunson has quickly established himself as their engine, able to toggle seamlessly between calling his own number and using his gravity to get great looks for the stars around him.

If the rest of the world didn’t already know about the young man who single-handedly changed the fortunes of a franchise, they’re learning mighty fast. Meanwhile, Barrett is showing that his playoff performance may have been a sign of bigger and better things to come.

One Down, One to Go?

Today’s “Ask Macri” comes from Ken, who wonders:

With Hart done, I am looking forward to a more detailed discussion by Jon of the pluses and minuses of extending IQ. Given the difficulties with trading a base year contract and the fact that he will be restricted so that the risk of losing him for nothing is minimal, I can see good arguments for no extension just yet.

As I usually like to do, let’s begin with some logistics…

Quickley’s Value

Next season, Immanuel Quickley is set to earn $4.2 million. It’s the result of the standard rookie scale contract he signed as the 25th pick in the 2020 draft, and it has left him vastly underpaid for the positive impact he has on the team. Last season, when IQ earned just $2.3 million, he generated more bang for the buck than any player in the NBA per Sportico:

Table courtesy of Lev Akabas of Sportico

I was blown away when XJ first retweeted this table back in June.

Granted, “wins added” is just one way to measure value, and it uses the sorts of advanced metrics that tend to rate Quickley very highly¹.

Still, to be atop a list that contains two players who just signed max contracts is pretty impressive. It would also seem to indicate that if New York has the opportunity to secure IQ’s services for less than half the total cost of Tyrese Haliburton and Desmond Bane, they should do so without blinking an eye.

They very well might, but it’s also not quite that simple. That’s because given New York’s current priorities, it’s uncertain what they feel is most important: securing an asset for the long term, or maintaining maximum flexibility for a potential trade?

No Match

As I’ve mentioned recently, if the front office extends their backup guard this summer, he’s all but guaranteed to spend the entire 2023-24 season in New York. That’s because just like RJ Barrett last summer, giving Quickley an extension would make trading him very complicated.

For anyone who may have repressed the entire Mitchell drama to the recesses of their memory bank, let’s do a quick refresher…

When a player entering the last year of their rookie contract extends on a new deal, their salary gets computed differently in a trade depending on whether they’re coming or going. This “poison pill” provision lasts until the following July 1, and means that IQ would count only as $4.2 million in outgoing salary for the Knicks, but as incoming salary for whatever team trades for him, he’d count as the average annual salary of his next contract. To make the math simple, if Quickley signs a four-year, $80 million deal and is then traded, his incoming salary would count as $20 million against the books for whatever team trades for him, or $15.8 million more than his outgoing $4.2 million salary counts against New York’s cap.

Under the CBA’s salary matching rules, this would make trading Quickley in a straight up 1-for-1 deal impossible unless it was to a team with a healthy amount of open cap space, of which there are none until after the poison pill provision is lifted. The reason is that Quick’s $4.2 million in outgoing salary can only return $7.4 million worth of contracts to the Knicks. On the other end of the deal, IQ’s incoming $20 million salary requires a team to send out at least $15.9 million back to New York. That’s an $8.5 million gap. Even if you assume they sign him for less - let’s say $18 million a season - the gap would prevent any simple trades until next summer, when he’d count for the same amount as both incoming and outgoing salary.

The only way to bridge that gap in the meantime is to keep putting more and more contracts into the trade so as to nullify the difference between Quick’s incoming and outgoing numbers. How high would the contract totals have to be to make the math work? Higher than is likely to be feasible this late in the summer, when teams are mostly settled with their roster, or even during the season, when big, multi-player trades are fairly rare.

Would a trade be impossible? Of course not. For instance, let’s say the Clippers start off horribly and they decide they want to move Paul George, who the Knicks were reportedly interested in. The math just barely works on RJ, Evan Fournier and IQ (on my proposed 4/80 extension) for Paul George and Robert Covington, even with LA’s tax-related trade restrictions.

Realistically speaking though, the poison pill provision takes the vast majority of trades off the table, at least until next summer. For that reason, if the Knicks extend Quickley, they’d have to feel pretty confident that they wouldn’t want or need to use him in a trade until after next July 1, which is when the poison pill provision is lifted. Even if they don’t think anything interesting is going to arise on the trade front before the season starts, they can’t know for sure what opportunities might be present at the trade deadline.

And while the NBA is highly unpredictable, I’m not sure how much that unknown will factor into their decision-making process, for two reasons:

1. If the Knicks are as good as we figure them to be, they’ll be disinclined to upset the apple cart and alter the rotation in a significant way in the middle of the season. Unless a genuine difference-maker comes on the market, they won’t move a player of Quickley’s caliber. On that note…

2. For as much as big names come up in rumors before every deadline, as I just noted, stars rarely get traded in February.

The one name I have to think the Knicks are keeping in the back of their mind is OG Anunoby. Toronto seems to playing with fire, what with a top-six protected pick owed to San Antonio, a seemingly middling roster, and both Pascal Siakam and Anunoby slated to enter unrestricted free agency. If their season starts to go sideways, might the point-guard needy Raptors be interested in a swap involving Quickley?

Anything is possible, but making plans based on the whims of Masai Ujiri seems ill-fated. If anything, Ujiri has shown a willingness to let his players hit free agency and deal with the situation then (including, it seems, by occasionally doing nothing and letting them walk). In that sense, the OG situation is one of several possible reasons why extending Quickley now might make him more valuable as a trade chip in the long term even if it means they can’t trade him for nearly a year.

Base-Year Headaches

If the Knicks don’t extend Quickley and then try to use him in a trade next summer, they’ll then be dealing with an entirely different complication than the one they’d face if they extended him now and tried to trade him before February.

You may recall the term “base year compensation” from early on last summer, when we discussed the complications involved with bringing Jalen Brunson aboard via sign & trade from Dallas. It’s similar to the poison pill issue in that a player’s incoming and outgoing salaries are different for trade purposes, but with slightly different numbers.

Basically, if Quickley is given a new contract next summer as part of a sign and trade, his outgoing cap number would be 50 percent of his 2024-25 salary. If we again use the example of a contract that starts at $20 million a season, that means he’d only count as $10 million in outgoing money but $20 million in incoming salary.

That’s not quite as large a gap to bridge as with the poison pill situation, but it still makes trading a restricted free agent more complicated, which is why these sorts of trades are rare².

Priorities, Priorities…

All of the above leaves us here:

Whereas extending Quickley this summer makes trading him before July 1, 2024 much more complicated, inking him to a new contract now would make trading him after July 1, 2024 far less complicated.

Given what I’ve already theorized about the unlikelihood of a trade opportunity materializing before next summer, this would seem to be one big reason to extend Quick now.

The other reason, perhaps obviously, is that they’d be rewarding a player who is massively important to their team. In a locker room where every other rotation player besides Quentin Grimes has gotten paid, giving IQ this level of security might pay dividends that can’t be quantified on a cap sheet. In essence, it would be New York’s way of telling Quick that they see and appreciate his immense value, even if his counting stats don’t jump off the page.

Recall that in 1647 non-Quickley minutes last season, the team was outscored by 2.1 points per 100 possessions. No other Knick regular who was with the team all season had a negative off-court net rating. On the flip side, when IQ played, New York outscored opponents by 6.2 points per 100 possessions. By these numbers, Immanuel Quickley transformed the Knicks from the 34-win Magic when he sat into the 57-win Celtics when he played.

Again, these on/off stats are just one indicator of a player’s worth and shouldn’t be considered the be all, end all. If they were, Josh Hart deserved the max instead of just $81 million. Still, it’s notable that even in the playoffs, when Quickley averaged just nine points on 35 percent shooting, New York was a far better team when he played than when he didn’t.

Viewing things from this perspective, one could easily argue that the front office’s only concern in contract talks should be trying to extend IQ’s team control for as long as possible.

Perhaps that’s their goal. My guess, however, is that for as important as IQ is as a floor-raiser during the regular season, the Knicks remain steadfastly focused on raising their ceiling to a championship level in May and June. To do that, a trade is going to need to be made at some point, and it is likely going to involve at least one of their good young players.

Should Quickley be that player? And if the Knicks wait until next summer to extend him, might they be able to sign him to a better value contract, thus making him more appealing to other teams? Or should New York just be focused on keeping IQ around for as long as possible? I’ll answer those questions, first by diving deep into the recent history of NBA restricted free agency, and then by examining New York’s roster and cap sheet, tomorrow.

CHECK BACK TOMORROW FOR PART II OF MY IQ EXTENSION DEEP DIVE!

🏀

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1. These are the same stats that hate RJ Barrett, which isn’t an accident. Quickley was more or less RJ’s backup last season, and the clearest line of demarcation between good Knicks basketball and bad Knicks basketball was drawn between IQ’s minutes and Barrett’s minutes, at least if you believe the numbers.

2. Two recent sign and trades of restricted free agents involve the Cavs, interestingly enough. First Lauri Markkanen was signed and traded from Chicago to Cleveland in 2021, and then last summer, the Cavs signed and traded Collin Sexton to Utah in the Donovan Mitchell deal. The third involved Lonzo Ball going from New Orleans to Chicago. I’ll touch on all three in tomorrow’s newsletter. For now, it’s sufficient to recognize that while these sorts of trades aren’t impossible, they add another layer of complexity to a process that already has plenty of moving parts.