Hitching your wagon or tying your franchise to a guy like Scottie Barnes is a no-brainer.
He comes with all the talent and the youth a team like the rebuilding Raptors is thrilled to have hit on in the NBA draft lottery.
Less obvious — and this is no slight on Immanuel Quickley — is basically is doing the same thing with a guy who, until his trade to Toronto, was a back-up point guard who is now going into his fifth season in the league and has never started more than the 38 games he did for Toronto last year.
Quickley was the 25th overall pick in the 2020 draft. A year later Toronto selected Barnes fourth overall.
Earlier this summer, the Raptors made the decision to extend Barnes with a five-year $224-million deal. Concurrently, they extended Quickley for $162.5 million over five years.
Barnes will be 29 when that deal expires and Quickley will be 30.
The Raptors clearly view these two pieces as the focal points on their roster.
Since Barnes’ rookie year, the likes of LeBron James and Kevin Durant have confirmed what the Raptors already knew: Barnes is a special player who is still getting better.
Quickley did not have the same level of support or confirmation for his game from the elite in the league, but he didn’t require any star endorsements to get his point across.
After acquiring him in the trade that sent OG Anunoby to the Knicks, the Raptors basically handed the reins of the offence to him and said: “Show us.”
The proof of that ‘show’ is in that deal he signed this summer.
With those two extensions, the team sent a clear message of just who the rebuild would be built around. It is and has been Scottie’s team since the day he was drafted, but Quickley is the other building block the Raptors have chosen to rest their foundation upon.
Raptors president Masai Ujiri rattled off the reasons he felt comfortable putting such responsibility on a player that maybe wasn’t always destined for it the way Barnes was.
“Talent, his personality, basketball IQ,” Ujiri began, just getting warmed up. “Shooting is a premium in the NBA now, competitive work ethic. His work ethic is incredible. I saw him in South Africa wake up every early morning to work out with (head coach) Darko (Rajakovic) every single day during Basketball Without Borders. I saw him visit teammates in the Olympics and workout every single day.
“To me, it’s the mindset. What kind of mindset do you have and what kind of work ethic do you have, and what kind of person, character are you? And Quickley has actually shown us that he’s very, very capable of these things.”
Truth be told, as much as Barnes is being portrayed and cast in the role of team leader and has admittedly spent a good chunk of his summer working on his leadership skills, Quickley is probably a little more natural in that role than his running mate.
Barnes’ ability on a basketball court to impose his will and run the game at his own pace is next to none on the roster, but Quickley commands a room more when he speaks.
He’s got an easy-going nature and a sense of humour that make him a natural communicator, but more than that he has a rock solid idea of what he and his team need to do to be competitive and he doesn’t let anything get in the way of that.
It was like what Ujiri made note of in both Africa and France this summer. While he was in both locales for obvious reasons — Basketball Without Borders in Africa to grow the game there and a chance to catch up with some of his Raptors teammates competing for their respective countries at the Olympic Games — never did he let either get in the way of his off-season workouts.
Quickley makes is very clear he doesn’t consider these workouts work, but rather an investment for down the road.
“I just look at it as like putting money in the bank so you can take it out when you need it,” he said. “In the summer, I don’t skip steps. I take my work very seriously. I get my day started early and I just take it seriously. I try to perfect my craft each and every day and I enjoy it, so I don’t look at it as work.”
For Quickley, it’s about deciding what you need to do to improve and then just do that until the improvement occurs.
“I just come in with the same mindset,” he said. “Whether the money or the wins, my mindset is all about ‘how can I get better today’ and ‘how can I be better tomorrow than I was the day before.’ That’s really all you can control. You really can’t control anything else.
“Like I said earlier, everything ends up working out the way God wants it to. When I first got traded, you always probably question about new decisions in life and new things that happened. But this is probably been one of the best things that’s happened to me. I’m looking forward to taking full advantage of it.”
Quickley was asked about the leaders he has been around and leaned on and the ones that impacted him the most.
While he maintained there were many and he wasn’t about to list them all in the event of leaving one out and thereby doing them an injustice, he did eventually mention one name that had everyone listening shaking their head in agreement and understanding.
“Derrick Rose just retired,” he said of the Chicago native who was a teammate of Quickley’s with the Knicks after a stellar tenure in his hometown with the Bulls. “He was on my team my rookie year. And to have an MVP, the youngest MVP ever, on your team as a rookie, plays the same position as you, you’re going to ask some questions, it’s something that I hold true and dear to me. He was a great teammate.”
If Quickley can be even half the leader that Rose was, the Raptors have already got their money’s worth from that five-year extension.