The Knicks gave up their heart and soul for OG Anunoby

Photo by Vaughn Ridley/NBAE via Getty Images

What the Knicks lost by trading Immanuel Quickley and R.J. Barrett.

On the penultimate afternoon of 2023, if you were in New York City, listening carefully, there was a siren’s blare, screaming across the gray winter’s sky. It was the sound of sudden absence, the departure of a wiry, plucky, eminently likable, uncommonly skilled and confident 24-year-old combo guard, catapulted to his new home at desperate speeds, soaring north, sounding a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues. It was the sound of the intriguing, beguiling Immanuel Quickley leaving the Knicks behind for good, ending an era in team history that will not be written extensively about, but I will always love.

IQ was the victim of what now appears to have been an inevitable consolidation trade (that somehow also added depth) between the Knicks and Toronto Raptors. With the perpetual aggravating two-steps-forward, two-steps-back dance the organization had been locked in for years with RJ Barrett, the Knicks cashed in for OG Anunoby, a proto 3&D monster and clear upgrade at the wing. The team somehow managed to hold onto their nice sounding but heavily protected bounty of first round draft equity, trading for a player that at one time had a three unprotected firsts price tag, only coming off Detroit’s second round pick in the 2024 NBA Draft. It was too good to be true, until you reached the show stopping name in Woj’s Tweet breaking the trade, and remembered this is Masai Ujiri, the Jigsaw-like executive who is one of the best GMs in any sport over the last decade, who is always going to make it hurt a little more than it has to. The team was being forced to sacrifice the heart and soul of its second unit, the prized player that was one bullshit Boston Mafia push away from the 2022-23 6th Man of the Year Award.

The move was one many Knicks fans, myself included, had been eyeing for a few seasons. Anunoby immediately improves the offensive spacing on the floor, and the overall defensive floor, but for now it’s a trade that provokes more questions than answers. It leaves a potentially better team in its wake, but the jury will be out for sometime on whether that team exists on paper or in the real world. Both teams exchanged their enigmatic, Magic Eye variables, and the broad fanbases sound equally dissatisfied (The wildest take I came across claimed the Knicks had traded two players, who are right now, both better than the player they received in return). My immediate Coinbase daytrader take is it feels like the Knicks didn’t quite press hard enough on their obvious leverage. Toronto is flailing, and had to make a move or they’d risk Anunoby and possibly Pascal Siakam joining the recently departed Fred VanVleet, losing yet another talent for zero return. Based on what New York gave up, you’d think they were the team that had to get a deal done and sold high to do so, rather than vice versa.

Either way, most agree this trade has to be given an incomplete for now, as it was a stepping stone move for both teams, with one if not more moves to make before we see the complete vision optimistic fans are projecting onto the front office. But along with the unceremonious shipping off of Obi Toppin in the offseason, it completed a Red Wedding that finally put an end to the franchise’s once promising homegrown core.

In 2019, the Knicks went 21-45, one third of which was accomplished under David Fizdale, the rest under “The Other Mike Miller”, after Fiz was fired. The team had jettisoned yet another future, as the Kristaps Porzingis project soured in the waning days of Melo and the franchise was looking down the barrel of another rebuild. In early March 2020, Leon Rose was announced as the architect of said rebuild. We can characterize the greater fan response as a shrug. Knicks fans can’t afford to be glass-half-full types, we’ve suffered too many disappointments over too many seasons. Rose was just another in a long line of highly touted saviors. We would wait, and we would see. A week later, the season ended suddenly, with the Knicks well outside the bubble.

The first two major decisions Rose made as Knicks president was hiring Tom Thibodeau. Then he surprised no draft insiders- but some curious basketball minds- by drafting Obi Toppin at No. 8 overall, when the team had a glaring need at point guard while a young prospect named Tyrese Haliburton was available, and then taking Immanuel Quickley, Tyrese Maxey’s backcourt partner in Kentucky, at No. 25. Knicks fans have had a long and tortured century with the NBA draft. In 2022, Michell Robinson finally broke a 23-year streak of draft picks who had never re-signed to a multi-year deal. Team history was littered with Gallinaris and Ntilikinas and Arizas, these tantalizing talents who either flamed out, or eventually thrived elsewhere. Obi and IQ came in together, a back and frontcourt tandem brimming with athleticism, great energy and good vibes, linked forever in Knicks fans’ minds. They joined a drafted core of Mitch and RJ, which would be subsequently added on to with Quentin Grimes and Deuce McBride (who uncoincidentally just signed a bargain bin three year, $13 million extension).

As Obi and IQ emerged along with Mitch and the RJ experience, as the team rocketed to 41-31 the next season, hosting a first round playoff series in a competitive Eastern Conference, Knicks fans felt a renewed sense of connection to their roster, hand picked and built up from humble beginnings. IQ would emerge as the centerpiece of this miraculous reclamation project.

Nearly four years into the Rose administration, two things have characterized his leadership: The shockingly sober, competent, conservative decision-making Knicks fans such as myself had been begging for since the halcyon days of Donnie Walsh, and odd, insidery, conflict of interest-rich relationships that also seem to play as motivating factors in roster decisions. The second has never seemed to have much of an impact on the first, and it’s hard to take issue with either given the stunning, immediate turnaround of the franchise, so the voices of discontent have been more or less muted, a position I doubt will change any time soon. But I’m not sure how much longer that benefit of the doubt should be lent.

There is logic to why Obi and IQ had to go. Both had better players with their near exact skillsets planted in front of them. But the fans clamored for them, and evidence for their value to the team mounted as Thibs continued to mess with their playing time. Narratively, they are our Carlos Peñas: inconvenient talents that have to be moved so the machine can run as it was designed. For fans of their work, the frustration is with the imagination of the engineer. Why couldn’t the design be adjusted to make room for these wonderful, high upside, additive elements? The answer is the last two years have shown the Knicks are run by a fucked, bizarro Moneyball in which the team personnel decisions are dictated by who Art Howe wants to play.

But did the disposal of Obi and IQ come down to who Thibs wanted on the floor, and when and where he wanted them there? If so, you could argue it’s bad process in terms of franchise management, but under Rose’s stern omerta, it’s hard to know if the dog is wagging the tail or the tail is wagging the dog, and who is the dog and who is the tail (Thibs? Leon Rose? Sam Rose? CAA? Masai Ujiri? Literally anyone but the fan base and most thinking basketball analysts?). At this point, the only thing that matters, and we know for sure, is the problem of playing time and usage for these young pieces have been resolved through non-resolution. Obi is gone. RJ is gone. IQ is gone.

Photo by Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images

None of this is to say IQ was a perfect player or a slam dunk star. He wasn’t. His playoff disappearances were glaring and had no obvious fixable flaw to explain what went wrong. There’s an argument to be made that his stellar statistical output was empty calories, feasting on regular season second units, playing the same position with more or less the same game as the team’s captain and breakout star. That Quickley was a player who demanded the type of money that would limit the Knicks’ options going forward under the impending CBA’s iron apron, and whose output could be replaced on the cheap in the aggregate.

But the stakes were so petty. Going into this season, he wasn’t extended over a difference of a reported seven million dollars a year, which probably would’ve actually meant three or four, had the Knicks not come with a pretty absurd lowball for a player of Quickley’s abilities (For perspective, 31-year-old Malcolm Brogden, the oft-injured player who barely stole Quickley’s 6th Man of the Year Award, signed a deal for $22.5 million per year under a lower cap two seasons ago). It would have been easy for IQ to let this extension dispute impact his on-court play and demeanor. It’s happened to lesser men, but not Quickley.

He did more than just talk a good game when the deal didn’t pan out. Adding a mid range weapon to his already extensive arsenal, he doubled down on last year’s campaign with soaring efficiency under a coach who claims to worship at the altar of shot selection. IQ has been either the Knicks’ third or fourth best player (and many nights, second), and along with Mitchell Robinson, two of their best homegrown talents since the ‘80s, who continued to make Thibs’ unwillingness to play him (down four minutes a game from last season!) increasingly bizarre. Ultimately, it may have come down to a religious question, blind disbelief: How much did this organization ever actually invest in this player, despite ample evidence they should?

At least for me, a long suffering Knicks fan who has been seduced and ultimately edged by the sexy big name free agent or heavy trade price player with tantalizing skills and glaring flaws over and over- you play this game of generational team fandom- the whole point of this thing, is finding and growing players like Immanuel Quickley. His game, his youth, the bond formed between fanbase and rookie, it was fun. I liked rooting for the team he came of age playing for, in front of my eyes. Winning a title is of course the goal, above all things, but if we’re being honest with ourselves, this new roster probably isn’t ready to seriously contend either. OG looks great now, but soon enough we’ll become intimately familiar with his foibles, and be frustrated by his occasional poor decisions, and we’ll wring our hands to argue over whether he’s a piece of our future or a passerby, whether his next contract is worth the spend. I truly hope I’m wrong, but my fear is we pushed our chips in early, that we deprived ourselves of a decade-plus of joy with IQ, this kid we were in on the ground floor with, far too soon.

RJ, I will watch from afar, and root for whenever I see him in town. But it was time to move on, and if he does flourish it will arguably be thanks to a necessary change of scenery. I will genuinely be happy for a by all accounts good kid should he go on to thrive back home in The 6. In the event IQ goes on to achieve the kind of success I believe he’s capable of, whenever he hits a game winner or shows up in a Drake video, I will probably have to look away, to change the subject when his name comes up in conversation, because it will make me sick with regret. Many Knicks fans you probably follow if you’ve read this far will participate in this obnoxious performative ritual for the next few years. The fans who liked IQ will post every time he does something good, taunting the fans of the same team who disagreed with them. The fans who didn’t like IQ will do the same every night he’s off. I will not be participating. We’ll never know what he could’ve been if he stayed in New York, good or bad, and going forward it will suck to continue thinking about, so I’ll do my best to limit those unproductive thoughts.

It’s far too soon to know what to make of this period in Knicks history. Will it be a blip, or a first chapter? An alternately inspiring and maddening mediocre crew of scrappers who overachieved for a few years of not very believable championship contention before being forced to regroup with a new roster (very much in the Thibs model), or the beginnings of a grand design en route to “real” success? Either way, both Obi and Quick (and RJ) represented more than bouncy, occasionally electrifying role players. They were shimmering talismanic symbols. They were the whole of our hopes and dreams.

Years from now, when I think of my years rooting for Immanuel Quickley, I will remember a random night last season, on March 5th in Boston. Brunson was out, Quickley was starting, and we got to see what an Immanuel Quickley-led Knicks team would have looked like, if life and circumstance and Thibs’ love of Alec Burks and Derrick Rose had manifested differently. It was an unbelievable performance. One of my highlights of a miserable calendar year. As he walked the ball over half court each possession down the stretch of a close game in the fourth quarter, everyone in TD Garden, and the bar I was watching in, knew what IQ wanted to do and more or less, and how he would go about doing it against Boston’s vaunted half court defense. In classic Quickley fashion, knowing this, and stopping it, were two very different things. He got to his spots, over and over and over again, and demoralized and dissected the best team in the East. He scored a career-high 38 points to go with eight rebounds and seven assists in a double overtime win, but the stats can’t properly convey how masterful it all was. He controlled the game. The Celtics could do nothing. He ate souls and spit flames. The ball was on a string, the bar was in a state of religious ecstasy. The future was bright, even for a room crowded with weathered, hard-hearted Knicks fans who had lived through so much incompetence, misery, and losing. And for a lovely, fleeting moment, a better world felt possible.

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