Making sense of the OG Anunoby, Immanuel Quickley and RJ Barrett trade between the Knicks and Raptors
The Knicks and Raptors made a trade on Saturday sending OG Anunoby to New York and RJ Barrett and Immanuel Quickley to Toronto, and there’s a lot of layers to it.
The trade
The Knicks traded Immanuel Quickley, RJ Barrett, and the likely 31st pick in this year’s draft for OG Anunoby, Malachi Flynn, and the Bronx’s own Precious Achiuwa.
The reports
From reports surrounding the trade, and from the last year, we also know a few other things:
The Knicks have long coveted Anunoby, and had talks about trading for him last season, allegedly around some RJ for OG framework.
The Raptors have resisted trading OG, despite a fever-pitch of alleged demand culminating in offers of three first rounders from Memphis and Indiana. Reports indicated the Knicks were also comfortable with a similar offer. Info on the quality of those picks (protection/unprotection, etc.) were hard to come by, though I could have sworn someone reported that they were not the best firsts in the world.
Immanuel Quickley was looking for a Devin Vassell-type deal this past offseason and going forward to his restricted free agency next summer — $135 million with approximately $10 million in incentives, so a deal in the $27-30 million yearly range for five years.
The Knicks’ highest offer was far removed from that — somewhere in the $80 million range over four years. They also had his restricted free agent rights, which would have allowed them to match any offer sheet sent his way. Now, the Raptors have that, and presumably will match whatever offer sheet he receives.
A driving factor in OG’s decision to switch agencies to CAA was who could get him a ton of money ($35-40 million annually), and also who might be able to get him to places he wants to be like New York, where he allegedly might take less money.
The timing of the deal surprised other executives, who thought the Raptors would wait until the trade deadline and allow other teams to compete and bid on OG, possibly raising his price further.
The first reaction: The Raptors got the best player in the deal
If you tried to develop a trade in a lab designed to send a maximum amount of chaos and shockwaves through Knicks fandom, short of trading for an MVP-type player or Kyrie Irving, it would probably look like this deal. RJ Barrett and Immanuel Quickley were the homegrown players emblematic of the Knicks for years: the former an emblem of upside and hope and later frustration, the latter of unexpected mana from heaven and of the ever-present spectre of potential mismanagement and poor coaching.
Shockwaves indeed — the whole day had me feeling like this tweet from my podcast co-host Shwin:
My first reaction was that the Raptors received a player who is likely the best asset in this deal, which likely means the Knicks overpaid significantly. I still think that the first part of that sentence, regarding the best player being IQ, is true. OG Anunoby is boring, but very talented in his own right and there will be plenty of upcoming podcasts, Twitter threads, and more dissecting his game.
Quickley is younger, projects to be paid less — whether he makes Josh Hart money or Devin Vassell money — and is better right now by most metrics. Additionally, IQ had not yet demonstrated the full impact of his skills since coach Thibodeau refused to play him more minutes and better minutes. He has higher upside, because upside in the NBA is largely based on shot creation — something IQ excels at and OG is terrible at. There is a very high probability that given more minutes in Toronto, Quickley hits numbers in the neighborhood of his per-36-minute averages over the last two years of 20/5/4 on 58-60 TS%, numbers made more impressive when you consider 1) he was not solely a play finisher like OG Anunoby but a shot creator and 2) his impact was even greater than his scoring stats due to stellar defense and decision-making.
The puzzling part: RJ’s inclusion in the deal
But what of the rest of the deal? Specifically, of the inclusion of RJ Barrett? This was the more puzzling part to me. I understand the desire to finally end the RJB experience, given his fifth year of mediocre-to-harmful play dotted with flashes of shot creation. To me, RJ’s value around the league is central to understanding this trade. If he was an underwater, negative asset requiring picks attached to move to some rebuilding team, a la Jordan Poole, that is a much different dynamic than if teams viewed him as an inconsistent high upside player with size that has inherent value no matter what play is attached to said size. I personally tend to think it is closer to the former than the latter for a few reasons:
We know that RJ’s inclusion in the Donovan Mitchell trade talks neither meaningfully reduced the number of picks or young players the Knicks would have had to attach. (Ed. note: In his post-trade pod, Zach Lowe said people around the league were calling Barrett a “toxic asset.”)
Since then, he closed last year’s regular season post-All-Star break shooting 45% from the field and 27% from three with poor impact stats, and has continued that trend this season despite a hot start from three and being in better shape thanks to the FIBA tournament. I won’t go into the statistics in depth, but he is very quickly exiting the ‘’has potential’’ stage of his career.
At the same time, the number of teams who would even be looking to take on bad contracts for picks has dwindled significantly. This year has more open competition, more parity, and less tanking than any in recent memory. Gone are the Presti-run teams gladly using their cap space to sin-eat bad contracts for picks. All that remain are the Spurs, Pistons, and Wizards: three teams with a not insignificant amount of young players – wing-size players, critically – who they are invested in (Devin Vassell, Jeremy Sochan, Bilal Coulibaly, Corey Kispert, Deni Avdija, Cade Cunningham, Ausar Thompson, to name some), with more young picks to come.
So to summarize, RJ’s value is likely at a career-low, and the market for trade dumps is also at its lowest in recent memory. The last such dump was Jordan Poole, who was moved for a measly top-20 protected first, a few second rounders, and cash, and he had demonstrated SOME positive value to a championship team at some point in his career, and SOME skills which he was above average at.
The million dollar question: why didn’t the Knicks keep IQ and just send RJ and picks?
Well, as you can tell from the hints above, my take is that RJ is not some lukewarm asset who a team like the Raptors would be happy to take for free, much less in exchange for a talented player like OG. Picks would need to be attached.
In that case, the ideal route would have been sending some picks along with RJ. How many and what protections would matter very much, but it would — in my estimation — be paying twice: once to acquire OG, himself a positive asset despite being a rental, and once to move off RJ. So it would probably not be some small change moving between teams here. Does that come out to three picks? Four picks? More than one unprotected pick? More than two? These are all good questions.
One explanation of this is that the Knicks used this trade to move off RJ, but also to move off Quickley while retaining draft picks (critical to the mythical future superstar trade), since they had no intention of paying Quickley more than some minimal amount. It’s simple, straight forward — the Occam’s Razor of explanations. That seems fair given how the franchise — both coach and front office — had not prioritized him over the years.
However, why not just keep him, sign and trade him if he got an offer sheet too rich for their liking? Use picks to move off RJ and acquire OG, and then recoup assets by trading IQ later? What would be the advantage of making moves right now?
One initial conclusion: Moving IQ had everything to do with moving RJ
It could be that the Knicks thought another team would shell out way more than they wanted to pay for IQ in restricted free agency, but more likely to me is that RJ’s stock was free-falling. I think that if the Knicks asked Toronto now for OG in exchange for RJ and picks, Toronto would have asked for more than the three-pick offers they had previously received — however good or bad those picks were. After all, if Toronto was discussing random expiring contracts or guys they could stick on their bench plus three picks for OG, and RJ is an underwater asset, why wouldn’t that overall package price increase? For comparison, the Pacers could offer Buddy Hield — who is both better than RJ and also expires this year — and three picks for OG. To take on RJ’s contract, shouldn’t Toronto ask for more from New York than they would from Indiana?
The hope, unspoken, but oft-tweeted, was always that RJB could produce enough while being paid $27 million on average to be the main salary in an outgoing superstar trade. However if the Knicks think other teams will no longer accept RJ as centerpiece salary in a pick-laden superstar deal, that would mean they lost their ‘’get out of RJB free’’ card. I know it’s not actually free, but what I mean is they would not be incurring a separate cost to move RJ in the grand scheme of things since their goal was always to send a boatload of picks for a superstar. So if they lost the ‘’get out of RJB free’’ card, only two other options remain:
A straight up salary dump to a shitty team who just wants picks and is happy to eat RJ’s contract.
As part of a trade like the one the Knicks just pulled off, paired with some number of positive assets, be that a player like Quickley or with picks, to acquire an upgrade.
As I mentioned earlier, I think the odds of Option 1 happening are as small as they have ever been. You could wait and try that, but it’s a risk if teams say thanks but no thanks because he will only continue to throw up bricks, or he will be benched and play less minutes — both things continue to sink his value further into the sea floor.
But who knows, maybe the Wizards would have taken two protected picks for him, or one unprotected, leaving you with most of your star trade picks and free of RJ. (This is ultimately informed speculation but speculation nonetheless on my part.)
With Option 2, as I mentioned earlier, I think you’d have to “pay up twice”: picks to move off the bad player and picks to acquire the good one. In the Knicks’ case, they used Quickley as almost all of the value: to both move off RJ and to acquire OG the upgrade, saving themselves some undefined number of picks in the process. If you think the cost to get OG is multiple picks and filler (think Fournier and his expiring contract), and the cost to dump RJ is multiple picks, that means they used Quickley as a piece of his deal who was valued pretty significantly.
That does not mean that the Knicks could dangle IQ and get three or four picks for him from the many teams who want him, though. The value of IQ here is probably tied to the Toronto-specific situation: not looking to purely tank and rebuild but to reload around Barnes, and not being super impressed with whatever three-pick offers were out there.
Finally, it’s also related to the transaction costs saved by both Toronto and the Knicks, who accomplish multiple goals in one transaction rather than needing to do a bunch of separate trades. The Raptors don’t need to trade OG in one deal and then go find a young ballhandler prospect in another. The Knicks don’t need to get into a bidding war for OG, and then also have some team like the Wizards hold their feet to the fire on an RJ dump. In that way, The Raptors and Knicks both have incentives to be a bit less hardliner in this kind of deal.
One final conclusion: The Knicks have sensible goals, and a sensible path, but shot themselves in the foot along the way
I think the Knicks’ goals make complete sense at the macro level. They want a big wing who can lock up, defend multiple kinds of stars, and be a top-notch play finisher from distance and from close. They think that kind of player complements Jalen Brunson, and perhaps complements what ever other star comes up I-95 in the future. I also think the Knicks’ goal of moving off RJ immediately makes sense.
What is incredibly stupid, is not playing a rising young stud who can both help you win now and also raise his trade value tremendously in the process. Even if the front office was not sold on IQ as an undersized complement to Brunson despite his gaudy stats and winning habits, they could have had him approach Vassell-like trade value pretty easily. There’s another timeline where they do this trade to acquire OG and move off RJB but receive picks from Toronto in the process, as they are the clear possessors of the best player in the trade. They shot themselves in the foot short-term and long-term by treating IQ as some journeyman bench guard, and now have much less to show for him than they should by all accounts.
Saying IQ could be a star-level impact guard is not some pie-in-the-sky wish casting, despite what many would like me to believe, simply because the combination of star-ish shot creation and defense is unheard of from non-wings or non-bigs. Just because it is foreign to most people as a concept does not make it less real. They could have kept him, they could have traded him, and either would have been more appealing strategically if executed from a place of leverage and confidence.
The Knicks never reached that place, because the coach had no interest in playing his winningest players if it went against his preconceived notions of when size is needed, or preconceived notions of player rotations being formulaic rather than adaptive to the game being played. Want to argue that the front office enabled Thibs? Sure, won’t get any pushback from me. All in all, this doesn’t mean that Leon and friends won’t reach their end destination — three or four impact star or superstar players surrounded by two-way, high-end role guys like OG — but it does mean they missed out on getting there faster and seeing some beautiful sights along the way.
