Immanuel Quickley didn’t sign an extension, and that’s probably OK

Immanuel Quickley’s extension deadline came and went earlier this week. Shwin and Prez converged to talk through it, and why it’s maybe not the sky-is-falling that some fans see it as.

Prez: SHWIN. What the hell man. There were a lot of extensions on Monday for the 2020 draft class — a record amount for any class, ever, actually. And our Knicks front office leaders always err on the side of team control. And yet, no extension for your beloved child, Immanuel Quickley. Should we be worried that the front office continues to undervalue IQ?

Shwin: I do think they undervalue him, but what he is worth and how his market as a restricted free agent shapes that value while giving the Knicks matching rights makes things a little bit more complicated. If there were no tax aprons at play, with serious restrictions to consider, I am sure the Knicks would have been happy to pay Quickley what he wanted or damn near close to it.

What's that number? I believe it’s safe to say IQ’s camp would have used the RJ Barrett contract along with the extensions inked this summer by Devin Vassell (five years, $135-146 million depending on incentives) and Jaden McDaniels (five years, $136 million) as key markers for what they felt he was worth.

Prez: Let me get this straight, since I am famously ignorant of cap mechanics. IQ’s camp thought he was worth closer to $25-27 million per year. Other (very) inferior bench guys like Cole Anthony and Onyeka Okongwu got $13 and $15.5 million per year, respectively. The Knicks offer landed in that gigantic grey area between $13-25 million (prognosticators like Zach Lowe expected something in the $17-20 range). But because of the anticipated position of the Future Knicks – presumably where they pay Brunson a whole lot more, and maybe have a max superstar making over $50 million – they were worried about having a third or fourth player making over $25 million on the roster?

Shwin: In a free market, he gets that money, but that is not how the NBA works. In the new CBA, non-max players are likely to struggle to find paydays on the open market, especially in restricted free agency, which Quickley is now going to be entering next summer.

Prez: I was kind of wondering about that — at least with the extensions signed yesterday, there seems to be two groups:

And nobody is in that $70-130 million range. On a per-year basis, the gap seems even more stark: Okongwu is making a little over $15, Avdija about $12, Anthony and Green around $13… and then McDaniels making $27.5, aka RJB money. What gives? Why no players in the middle tier? Surely the Knicks offered IQ more than $15 million per year, and surely more than Josh Hart is making — an average annual value for four years of $20 million per season? 

Shwin: We know they love Hart, so probably something slightly above his number is a good estimate for a lower-end Knicks offer. Hart got four years, $71 million that’s guaranteed after his opt-in and extend, so a Quickley offer maybe was say $80 million over four years at the low end, with a take it or leave it top-end offer at $90 million. It’s also reasonable to believe Quickley’s camp views the Knicks offer as a rather safe floor for what will be available to him next summer and that the upside of playing out the year with the potential for playoff redemption at the end can secure him the contract he wants. 

On the Knicks side, even if they believe he’s worth the type of contract that was given to Vassell or McDaniels in a vacuum, the fact he will not be the starting point guard here, and with a future crunch looming on their cap sheet, dictated they hold the line for now.

Prez: So it was more of a cap sheet, cold-hearted negotiation ploy? A bet that he won’t breach that green square group of five-year deals or deals with AAVs over $21 million? That’s tough to stomach, but I guess there’s some logic there. Stuff like that happens way more in the MLB where the contract battles become damn near adversarial for young players. 

I know you— like me and most other Knicks fans — preferred the extension. Obviously a lot of that is from attachment to the player and wanting to have the certainty of a good young homegrown talent locked in on your team for years to come. But surely there was some strategic advantages to an extension, right? What advantages would the extension have had, that the front office is foregoing? I’m just trying to grasp all the risks and rewards.

Shwin: The clearest advantage of an extension is that while trading him in season would have been more difficult, it would have made it much easier to include him in trade for Embiid or somebody else after the season as his salary would just count for what the number is. Not to get too in the weeds, but the aggregation to sign-and-trade a restricted free agent is a lot trickier — not impossible, as Cleveland managed to pull off with Collin Sexton in the Donovan Mitchell trade, but much harder.

The other piece of this is that even if you want to use him as a chip in that scenario via sign-and-trade, Quickley, to a large extent, needs to play ball with you. Sexton’s market was dry and he had nothing going while the Mitchell extensions dragged all offseason until Labor Day weekend. Would IQ’s market play out similarly, or would he be able to nab an offer sheet before that and force the Knicks’ hand to make a decision (kind of like when the Suns were actively shopping Deandre Ayton as a restricted free agent and he undercut them by signing his offer sheet with the Pacers)? If they do have to match an offer, it makes him ineligible to be traded for a year, which obviously limits their flexibility even more.

Ironically, by not extending him, it may increase his shelf life on the Knicks.

So how would this play out if he does have a strong season and a team is willing to make him an offer sheet worth $27 million per year AAV? Do the Knicks match? Do they look to work a sign-and-trade — more difficult under the new CBA, and the returns for which are often piss poor?

Prez: As you know, it’s hard for me to escape my REAL HOOPER perspective. If he is hooping in a way where he earns a deal like that, wouldn’t that work with their future plans for contention? To me, what changes in that situation is the plans regarding other Knicks. No matter how optimistic you are about Grimes or RJB, IQ forcing a contract like that means he not only is better than them (that is true right now), but the gap between them has become pretty significant, probably enough to be a starting 2-guard even with Grimes’ point of attack wing defense prowess. To use another example, with your favorite player in the league Devin Vassell, if he was on the Knicks as a sixth man and put up rough per 36 numbers of 22-4-5 with elite middy numbers (i.e. what he did last year for the shitty Spurs), I’m pretty sure the front office wouldn’t say “well, Grimes is a better POA guy and that’s all that matters, so Dev you’re stuck on the bench!” 

That’s a long way of saying that the Knicks probably match, and alter other plans they have to allow them to keep Quickley with Brunson (and superstar whoever, presumably). 

I want to shift gears a bit… I have a  theory, tell me what you think. I think a lot of the dismay from some Knicks fans comes from the emotional attachment to IQ, and the fact that despite having a great team season last year, there’s still anxiety that it will all fall apart. Additionally, IQ has had to claw and scratch for playing time over inferior players and have outlier improvement almost every year in different parts of his game… while other players ranging from downright awful point guards like Elfrid Payton and Alec Burks (great wing, not great point guard) to other homegrown kids like RJ Barrett and Mitchell Robinson seemingly get minutes and money aplenty, disappointing on the court in different ways. Am i calling Knicks fans EMOTIONAL? You bet. It’s not a pejorative, it’s descriptive, and synonymous here for passionate. What do you think?

Shwin: I can’t speak for all Knicks fans, but much of what you said is probably accurate. We have a lot of scar tissue built up over many years of illogical team building and even now, when it’s good, it’s hard to feel like the foundation is stable when being a fan of the franchise has been a never-ending series of gut punches over the years. Lucy is always pulling the ball away from us.

To answer it on a personal level, I think the mindset that if your team is not a championship contender it’s a pointless team, misses the premise that sports are supposed to be fun. Players are great, good, average, bad, horrible, and many layers in between, but the worst thing they can be is boring. When a player like Quickley, who the Knicks drafted with the 25th pick, then develops in New York into a good, fun, charismatic, player who has consistently punched above expectations throughout his career, it means something more to me than just the value he provides on the court, or what his asset value is, or how it can be most fucking optimized to improve the Knicks’ championship percentages.

Yes, I want the Knicks to win a championship badly, but I don’t want to be Thanos and give up my soul for it. The young players on this roster represent what I have wanted the Knicks to do for as long as I can remember, and I’m certain I’m not alone in that which is why there is a certain degree of “prospect hugging” from Knicks fans. When was the last time this team had a playoff-caliber rotation in which three starters and a key reserve were drafted and developed here?

If the entire point of that is only to maximize them as assets and contracts, that feels shitty. I thought it was shitty last summer when RJ’s extension was overshadowed by reports of how he could still be included for Donovan Mitchell. I think the immediate fervor over “well, this makes Quickley a much better trade chip this season” is also shitty.

I’m not sure if that’s all coherent, and I am not suggesting the Knicks should never trade guys they’ve drafted. I wasn’t broken up when they traded Toppin, who needed to be moved for obvious reasons — but this ain’t that.

For me, personally, Quickley, who has been central to helping turn things around in New York, and has won his minutes on the court in every circumstance, any role, no matter what’s been asked of him over three years, is somebody I wanted to see extended now. He, like many others on this team, epitomizes what it means, to be a New York Knickerbocker, which is why this group resonates with me. 

Prez: Much of that checks out for me as well. Even back in the dark ages, Jamal Crawford was my favorite Knick because he was fun — even if he wasn’t particularly good. This isn’t a game of chess — the pieces have personalities. 

I guess I am probably a degree less disappointed than most because to me the lack of an extension doesn’t represent some huge increase in odds that he leaves the team. The Knicks don’t deal in mid-season downgrades, so you can rule out a Quick-for-picks situation. And while the fear of some team like the Spurs swooping in and giving IQ some insane deal which the Knicks would be ill advised to match seems real to many, it never seemed real to me. It is incredibly rare for that to happen, and the combo of 85% of teams having starting point guard spots decided already makes it tough for a team to invest in IQ using the logic of “we have to overpay to get him, he’s not worth $27 million, but we’ll spend $27 million.” Slightly more realistic is what you said – he becomes a “true” $27 million player, in which case the Knicks would then have every reason to match because he’d be a Vassell-, McDaniels-level player-asset who could complement superstars. 

But much more realistic than all those things is a scenario where IQ remains very fucking good, in specific ways which are not conducive to gigantic paydays due to some things out of his control (i.e. minutes distributions, the fact that off-ball defense does not earn you money, the fact that short players and later picks almost always earn less money regardless of production, etc). And in that situation, a team might offer him a nice offer sheet in the 20-25M range, which would be rather easy to match, and arguably a steal for the Knicks. That doesn’t seem so bad to me! Alas, it lacks the “thanks for your services” element that we all agree IQ deserves, but that happened with Mitch (who, admittedly, many more fans not named Prez or Shwin were skeptical about paying) and that’s all water under the bridge now. Dude came back to us, became MORE central to the team, and keyed a real playoff run. So while it might be a gut punch to some now, my advice would be: mourn for a little, then get ready for a prove-it year for IQ which will be fun as hell, especially since the trade-winds (see what i did there) dictate he’ll probably still be in NY for a while.