I spent a long time playing competitive pool. I started early, at age eight or nine. My dad had to write the liquor and gaming commission to allow me to play tournaments at bars late at night. It made me a good shot, but it also meant that I didn’t understand everything I should have. For example, I shot for maybe a year with a break cue. Ball control was tough. The first time I used the right cue, with the right tip, and tried to draw the ball across the table, it was like standing my whole life and finally sitting down. Even if a square peg can fit in a round hole, sometimes it feels better when things fit together.
Immanuel Quickley has spent a long time playing in a new role with the Toronto Raptors. In 2022-23, his final season with the New York Knicks, he played almost three-quarter of his possessions as a shooting guard. In 2024-25, he played almost 90 percent of his possessions as a point guard. This past season, according to Cleaning the Glass, that ratio rose to 100 percent as a point guard. And, sure, that tracking is wrong because he spent minutes alongside Jamal Shead certainly as the off-ball guard. But he ranked 19th in the entire league this past season in touches per game. His role has changed as a Raptor.
Quickley has been solid as a point guard for the Raptors. Not terrible, by any means. He’s a great shooter and a pretty efficient scorer as a result. He ranked 25th in assists per game. And yet, those generally came as a result of his recipient doing the work, not because he created advantages by hitting the paint and then passed for layups. The team’s offence has been more or less the same with him on the court or on the bench since he joined the Raptors (and was worse with him playing this last season).
It’s not that Quickley is bad as an initiating guard. It’s that he’s not elite at creating for others (unless it’s Jakob Poeltl, as the two have terrific synergy together). And at the same time, he is at his best when others create for him.
What Quickley can do with an almost incomparable ability is bang in catch-and-shoot jumpers. The 4-.4-40 club (players who attempt at least 4.0 catch-and-shoot jumpers a game, shoot at least 40 percent on them, and played in at least 40 games) is a tight-knit club of 21 mostly specialists. There were few point guards on the list; Quickley actually led all 21 players in touches per game last season.
At the same time, despite Quickley being an efficient pull-up shooter (despite a down year this past season), he only attempts a small handful there per game. He doesn’t have a quick release, or a high release, or a truly elite (for the NBA) handle, so he’s not able to find room for pull-up triples unless defences concede them.
If Quickley is attempting shots off the catch, possessions are about as efficient as any in the NBA. If he’s attempt shots off the dribble, the Raptors will struggle to score. The real problem is that he didn’t have any other teammates with pull-up 3-point shooting chops (on volume), so defences weren’t bent enough for him to find enough standstill triples.
Kawhi Leonard, new Raptor, again, should solve all that in one fell swoop.
He attempts far more pull-up triples per game than Quickley. In fact, his 3.9 pull-up triples per game last season almost doubled Quickley’s per-game attempts, and on far better efficiency, to boot. In fact, Leonard was one of four players to play in 50 games, attempt 3.5 pull-up triples per game last season, and shoot at least 37 percent on such shots.
He won’t shift the hierarchy on the team when it comes to who touches the ball, where, and when. He and Brandon Ingram averaged almost identical numbers of touches last season, and both prioritize isolation attempts. It’s just that Leonard is much, much better on those attempts. He will bend defences by far wider margins, draw more double teams, initiate from further away, and generally open the floor for his teammates by much wider margins that Ingram did.
At the same time, he will allow Quickley to continue to play point guard. Quickley is a point guard. But he needs teammates to handle some elements of offensive creation that some other point guards (generally superstars) shoulder themselves. Scottie Barnes has generally handled all north-south passing for the Raptors. Leonard will handle much of the pull-up shooting and isolation play. Quickley will still run his fair share of pick and rolls. He will still finish oodles of possessions. In fact, his shot attempts might feasibly increase from last season.
But his responsibilities will be lighter, allowing him to focus more on his strengths. His almost three seasons as a Raptor have, in some ways, been the team and player trying to force a square peg in a round hole. But it’s been so long that his edges have become increasingly rounded, his shape bent and formed to fit the role in which the Raptors have increasingly pushed him. It hasn’t been perfect, and it won’t be perfect. But it’s become a better and better fit.
And the Raptors will finally have a stable of teammates who can ease Quickley into a role that perhaps, if you squint, can be closer to perfect. Not the perfect role that he played on the Knicks years ago. That was perfect for him then, but he’s changed and grown as a player. Perhaps he can be in a role that will be perfect for him now.
The final frontier of fit and skillset and team weakness is rim pressure. Leonard no longer offers it, which is why going forward, as in past seasons, the team will rely on heavily on RJ Barrett. But Scottie Barnes’ ability to attack the basket exploded in the playoffs. If he can remain improved in that regard, even if not to the helter-skelter degree of the playoffs, that will lift further burden from Quickley’s shoulders.
I eventually bought myself a Predator cue and learned how to put the cue ball anywhere it wanted to go. The Raptors don’t even need to go to that extent. They don’t need to find a new point guard. With Leonard on board, if all goes to plan, they might find that Quickley seems like a whole new point guard himself.
