This is Part II of my series on the RJ Barrett-Immanuel Quickley-OG Anunoby trade. Check out part I here.
IV
The most valuable position in the modern NBA is the wing. It may seem old fashioned, especially in an era of supposedly “position-less” basketball, but size matters. You can still place almost every NBA player into one of three distinct groups. There are centers, clumsy, loping colossuses, 6’10” or taller, who stand under the basket, block shots, get rebounds, dunk and grunt loudly. There are guards, who are usually 6’5” and shorter. Since they can’t get by on height alone like the centers, they have to develop crafty skills in order to avoid getting smushed like ants by the opposing colossuses. These skills usually include shooting, passing, doing cool dribbling tricks that fake out defenders and leave an open lane to the rim, finding clever ways to initiate contact with the defender in order to draw fouls, and most of all, shooting.
And then there are wings (also called forwards). Coming in somewhere between 6’5” and 6’10” these guys were traditionally expected to be something in between, not as skilled as the guards, not as vertically gifted and athletic as the centers. But in the modern NBA, they are expected to instead be both. If you are the player agent of an NBA forward, the word you want the local reporter to use most often to describe your guy is “versatile.” On defense, the team needs him to be able to defend the other team’s point guards at the perimeter and then also switch to protecting the rim from their big guys. On offense, the wing needs to have both the athleticism to take the ball to the rim, and the ability to drain threes at will. The wing is expected to “have it all,” to be the guy on the dating app with nice eyes AND a great personality, the perfect combination of sexy and cute.
Even at the professional level, very few players can do this, so starting-caliber wings are well paid. If you are 6’6”, and you can make open threes at a 40% clip and play stingy defense (“3-and-D”), then you can “fit into any system,” which means that even though you are “just a role-player” with no ball-handling or offensive creation responsibilities, you are still immensely valuable. Devin Vassell, the 23-year old, 6’5” small forward of the absolutely terrible San Antonio Spurs, just received a five-year contract extension worth more than $30 million per year, very close to the max. He’s never been on a team that was good, or even didn’t suck, and while he’s developed as a shot creator, he’s never shown that he can be the best player on a good NBA offense, and most agree that he will never get there. But he’s a wing, so because of his size, shooting, and athleticism, he’s, in the words of the Athletic’s Sam Vecenie, “a valuable, versatile player to play next to [Spurs all-galaxy generational prospect] Victor Wembenyama.” Klay Thompson, the archetypical 3-and-D wing of the era, has never been able to pass, grab rebounds, or even dribble, but has nonetheless been an essential cog in the most dominant modern basketball machine, and has 5 All-Star Games, four rings and $233 million in career earnings to prove it.
But a 3-and-D role player is the less sexy outcome for a developing wing. What you really want is Lebron James. If your guy is 6’9”, an elite athlete AND an a gifted individual scorer and passer, then you have an MVP candidate. Klay Thompson and Devin Vassell are valuable because they can play in any kind of system. But at their best, wings like Lebron, Kevin Durant, and Kawhi Leonard can be the system all by themselves, dragging their teammates on deep playoff runs over and over no matter how bad they are, like a mama possum carrying her young.
In 2019, Kawhi Leonard led the upstart Toronto Raptors to a NBA finals victory over Steph Curry and the Warriors, ending their dynastic reign and denying them their fourth championship in five years. In those finals, he played 40 minutes a game, led his team in scoring, and was by far the best defensive player on the floor, becoming the first player to meaningfully disrupt Steph Curry in the finals in many years. For his heroic efforts, he won his second Finals MVP award and cemented himself as one of the very best players in the league. In the four years since, he has missed two entire seasons due to injury, insisted on playing essentially half of the remaining regular season games even when he’s healthy due to “load management,” and crashed out of the playoffs early every year. Nevertheless, on Wednesday, his Clippers signed him to a three-year extension worth $153 million, keeping him one of the top ten highest-paid players in the league. If the last five years are a representative sample, Kawhi has a 40% of being completely unavailable, a 40% of getting thoroughly outclassed in the early rounds of the playoffs, and a 20% of being a superhero MVP who can drag anyone to a championship. The Clippers are paying him $50 million a year1 because even a small chance of that last outcome is basically priceless, because for the last fifteen years, ball-dominant, two-way2 wing scorers are the most valuable assets in the league.3
Before starting his freshman year at Duke in 2018, ESPN ranked RJ Barrett number 1 in his college recruiting class (above Zion Williamson). At draft time six months later, Zion and Ja Morant had passed him with historic college seasons, but RJ was still considered a generationally elite prospect, of the caliber that could have easily gone first overall in most other draft classes. When the Knicks drafted him third, it was impossible not to dream that he might be the one who could finally end the Knicks draft curse, develop into a star, earn a maximum extension, and be the centerpiece of the team for the next decade. The reason was simple; he was 6’7”, with a 6’10” wingspan, the explosive lateral athleticism necessary to play NBA caliber defense, decent shooting form, and most crucially, a precocious ability to read defenses and make tough passes. In short, he had all the raw tools necessary to develop into a ball-dominant, two-way wing superstar.
V
In the past four years, it’s become clear that RJ is not that. What he is instead, is a gritty, hard-working, perhaps slightly below average but certainly starting-caliber small forward. On any given night, he can go off and score thirty-plus by using his quick first step to drive to the rim at will, like he did against the Warriors on Monday. On most other nights, he will simply play decent defense, grab rebounds, make good passes, and hold his own. This, to be clear, makes him an incredibly valuable player, because there are fewer small forwards like this than there are teams that need them. Last year, the Cleveland Cavaliers entered the playoffs with a quartet of the hottest budding superstars in the league in Donavan Mitchell, Darius Garland, Evan Mobley, and Jarrett Allen. The issue was that basketball requires five players to a team, and the Cavs (who I have to stress again were a very very good team!) simply did not have anyone good enough to play the small-forward position. The Knicks beat them in five games.
The Knicks traded earlier this month because he’s a slightly awkward fit with the other starting forward, Julius Randle. Both are ball-dominant lefties, who want to overpower their defenders and drive to the hoop, something they can’t both do at the same time. Randle pairs better with a pure “3-and-D role player” Klay Thompson-esque wing, who can cover for his shortcomings on defense, and shoot threes well enough to draw defenders away from the paint. OG Anunoby, who the Knicks received in exchange for Barrett, is maybe the best pure “3-and-D” wing in the league.
The Knicks included Immanuel Quickley in the deal because he’s proven himself worthy of a starting point guard job, with a starting point-guard sized contract, and the Knicks already have Jalen Brunson, a better (and probably cheaper) point guard. In a vacuum, there’s no shame in drafting a speculative point guard late in the first round, developing him into a mid-tier starter, and then trading him for someone who fits better, instead of extending him long term. The move makes logical sense, and the Knicks are 5-1 since they made it.
But the trade also means that this front office is giving up on the dream of drafting and developing a superstar, and revert to their draft-pick trading, free-agency spending, star-acquiring ways. In exchange for becoming a better team, the Knicks are resigning themselves to their draft ghosts. It’s important to look back and remember the brief moment when RJ and Quickley emerged and it seemed like we finally had a chance of vanquishing them.
VI
It was February of 2021, NBA games were still playing in empty arenas due to the pandemic, and I was locked in my room. In order to return to campus for my spring semester of senior year of college, I had to enter into a four-day re-entry quarantine period, where I could only leave my room twice a day for meals. Looking back, this was a completely insane situation4, and the fact that it felt completely reasonable and unremarkable at the time is a brutal indictment of how grim the previous year had been. With nothing to do on my first night, I opened my laptop and booted up the only live sports event I could find in the barren expanse between the Super Bowl and March Madness: a regular season matchup between the 11-15 New York Knicks and the 6-16 Washington Wizards.
As you can see from this highlight reel, the vibes were atrocious. The broadcast piped in artificial crowd noise to mask the echoey emptiness of the arena. Without the variation in volume and intensity that you normally get when the crowd responds in real time to the flow of the game, this created the sensation that tens of thousands of zombies, or video game NPCs, had decided to hang out in the stands, but were ignoring the game entirely, which was in a way a much more disturbing image than the reality of the empty arena. Meanwhile, even watching the highlight reel, which ostensibly shows you the very best moments from this game, you can tell that these are two teams playing a very poor form of professional basketball, with no discernible defensive scheme, janky pullup mid-range jumpers in traffic, and an alarming number of missed layups. Nevertheless, while both of these teams seemed quite bad, it became increasingly clear as the game progressed that the Knicks were dramatically better than the Wizards. “Huh,” I thought, as the Knicks opened up a fifteen point lead at the end of the third quarter. “They’re actually dominating right now. That’s odd.”
In my wildest dreams, I could not have imagined what happened next. The Knicks continued their spell of uncharacteristic mediocrity, winning six of their next eight games against an extremely weak set of opponents. On February 28th, they defeated the (atrocious) Detroit Pistons to reach a record of 18-17, above .500 after thirty games for the first time in almost ten years. And the vibes began to improve. “The Knicks are Above .500, and We Must Remain Vigilant,” Defector’s Tom Ley warned, noting that Knicks fans had already begun to congregate outside Madison Square Garden to gesticulate wildly and scream obscenities into the night. On March 1st, I went for a nighttime, masked walk through a foot of snow with a girl I’d had a crush on for months, and asked her to be my girlfriend.
On March 5th, Knicks power forward Julius Randle, derided the previous year as one of the worst free agent signings of the past decade, was named to the 2021 All-Star team, after a dominant stretch that placed him on the league-wide leaderboards for points scored, assists, and rebounds. On March 17th, I celebrated my 22nd birthday by having a picnic outside my dorm room for fifteen of my friends, an unfathomably large gathering of people. On March 30th, I drove to a CVS an hour off campus to receive my first dose of the Moderna vaccine.
On April 9th, the Knicks squared off against the Grizzlies in the Garden that, thanks to the wise beneficence of fearless COVID chevalier Governor Cuomo, was played in front of a 10% capacity crowd, including giddy courtside pair Chris Rock and Jon Stewart. Down six with less than a minute to go, Julius Randle drew a three-point play, and then after snagging a rebound away from Lithuanian colossus Jonas Valincunis, RJ Barrett drained three clutch free throws, then drove the ball directly into reigning Rookie of the Year (selected over Barrett, unanimously) Ja Morant’s chest to sink the game-tying layup as time expired, before leading them to a four-point win in overtime. On April 23rd, I played a full-field seven-on-seven game of ultimate frisbee, for the first time in more than a year.
On May 3rd, the Knicks beat the Grizzlies again, having gone on a 11-1 run since their last matchup. On May 13th, I got the job that I had spent the previous month interviewing for. On May 26th, the Knicks, having earned not only their first playoff berth in ten years but also a top-four seed with home court advantage, beat the Atlanta Hawks in the Garden in Game 2 of the first round of the playoffs. In that game, after the team fell behind in the first half, rookie point guard Immanuel Quickley drained a game-tying stepback three.
A few months earlier, it would not have been shocking to hear people predict that sporting events might simply never be able to have packed crowds again, that this would come to be seen as a bizarre relic of a before-time when we were all too ignorant to realize how reckless and indulgent we were being. And it certainly wouldn’t have been surprising to hear experts declare that the Knicks were fundamentally doomed, that their 20-year drought on young prospects would continue indefinitely, and that they would never be able to escape their vicious cycle of talent poverty. Instead, when the Hawks called a timeout after Quickley’s three, the broadcast cut to a now fully sold-out crowd, screaming and shaking deliriously, as Spike Lee jumped up and down in a neon orange fedora. In RJ Barrett and Immanuel Quickley, the Knicks had not one but two young stud prospects. And here they were, dominating in the playoffs5. Again, in my wildest dreams, I could never have imagined it.
You may well ask, if the Clippers are paying Kawhi $50 million per year, how can Devin Vassell’s $30 million be near “the max”? Did you think “the max” actually meant “the maximum amount you can pay a player”? Did you think there weren’t a million loopholes and exceptions? You sweet innocent child! You absolute fool! (The short version is that players can always get annual 15% raises, so Kawhi’s maximum is much larger than Vassell’s, but the short version is wrong in many ways I’m sure.)
This is basketball speak for being good at both offense and defense. It is a surprisingly rare trait.
Caveat! Recently, a new archetype has emerged that has threatened to usurp the wing: the ball-dominant, do-it-all center. In the last few years, players like Giannis Atetokoumpo (who switches between center and forward), Nikola Jokic, and Joel Embiid have boldly asked the question: “what if I can have some or all of the scoring skills of a guard while also being 7 feet tall?” At 7,3’. Victor Wembenyama is poised to be the next iteration of this MVP center archetype. For now, though, there are only a few truly elite ball-dominant giants like this, and it remains to be seen if the tier below (Alperin Sengun, Damontas Sabonis, Karl Anthony-Towns) can be good enough to justify taking the ball away from their teammates. For most teams, getting a superstar wing remains the most obvious path to title contention.
To be clear it was the only option! We were all unvaccinated and cases were surging, it would have been completely irresponsible to let us all come back to campus without quarantining. It was just an insane situation.
Well… maybe not dominating. The Knicks won Game 2, but lost Games 1, 3, 4, and 5, quite decisively. Still though.