Immanuel Quickley’s 2025-26 season was best defined by his resolve to push beyond his limitations, and by how those limitations pushed back.
The jittery, sharpshooting guard provided meaningful moments, both with game-deciding shots and promising progress in his play. The former was fun and triumphant, and while the latter still leaves questions when it comes to Quickley’s current role as the team’s lead guard, it provided significant intrigue.
Then, when it came time to test the true core of Quickley’s game in the unforgiving elements of the NBA playoffs, injury struck. This could have been the best learning opportunity of all for Quickley and the Raptors regarding his viability on a true contender. But it was lost to a strained right hamstring.
It would have been particularly interesting to see how Quickley’s improved resilience playing off two feet in the middle of the floor would have translated to the hyper-physical realm of playoff basketball. His shooting percentage from inside the arc improved to 52% from 46.5% the previous season.
I won’t go any further on his meaningful improvement from 2-point range and how that came to be, as Joe Wolfond already covered it in depth in a piece where he spoke to both Quickley and his skills trainer, David Lam.
But the other area of Quickley’s offence that has left plenty to be desired since he joined the Raptors and his role shifted, was his ability to create opportunities for teammates off the dribble. It is one of a point guard’s primary duties, after all.
His struggles getting downhill and tendency to kill advantages by picking up his dribble early have been well documented on Raptors Republic. Maybe the best example of this was a piece by Louis Zatzman from this time last year that revealed Quickley had only five halfcourt assists from the paint that led to rim attempts for teammates in 2024-25. Instead, much of his consecutive career-high assist numbers over the last two seasons have come as a result of Darko Rajaković’s pass-heavy system (the Raptors have been top three in assist percentage for the last two seasons). Quickley has often found players coming off of screens or initiated with a simple pass, with the scorer doing much of the work.
This season, I noticed quite a few more instances where Quickley touched the paint and dropped a dime inside. Certainly more than the five he had the previous season. So I decided to track them and see how many.
He had 22 half-court assists for layups or dunks from inside the lane. Many of which were him beating his defender, getting the low man to step up, and gift-wrapping a bucket. It’s worth accounting for Quickley playing only 33 games the previous season, but he still averaged 0.31 halfcourt paint-to-rim assists this past season, up from 0.15 the previous season. This might seem like a negligible stride, but that’s a 100% increase. Like going from five assists per game to 10.
A stat like rim assists provided by websites like databallr gets partway here. But the added context is that many of Quickley’s “rim assists” came on plays where he passed to players in the mid-range, or even behind the 3-point line, and it was their elbow grease, not Quickley’s, that got them the rest of the way. Those 22 were the ones where he did the actual legwork to generate the advantage.
These “home run” plays could still come more frequently, considering the amount of opportunity he had. (His 3.2 pick n’ roll ball-handler possessions per game was second on the Raptors after Brandon Ingram.) Yet it was a crucial improvement and provides promise for Quickley’s continued development as a playmaker.
And strictly as a scorer, he managed to net a point per possession out of the pick n’ roll, the best mark on the team, and 85th percentile league wide. This was due in large part to his greater resilience playing off two feet in the paint, with a dash of pull-up 3s mixed in.
Long-range pull-up shooting is probably Quickley’s greatest contribution to the Raptors. They are almost completely bereft of it — Toronto was last in pull-up 3s and attempts — and would be entirely without Quickley. His two pull-up 3s per game accounted for over 40% of their attempts in the regular season, and their league-low 4.9 attempts dipped to 3.9 in the playoffs. Toronto didn’t even make one until Game 3 against the Cleveland Cavaliers; it had only eight all series.
All told, his overall shooting talent is far too valuable on a Raptors team that needs more shooting, not less, for him to be considered expendable.
Quickley dropped the most efficient 40-ball in NBA history against the Golden State Warriors in January (7-of-8 from deep, 112% true shooting!). Earlier that month he sank the Charlotte Hornets with a game-winning buzzer-beating triple.
He provided plenty of moving moments for the Raptors this past season, both big and small. Whether Quickley continues as Toronto’s lead guard, or his role shifts into something better suited to his skill set, he should have multiple avenues to continue doing so in the future.
