How Raptors' Quickley draws inspiration from Curry as he settles into starting role

Salt Lake City – As he settled into his spacious seat on the Toronto Raptors charter for his first road trip with his new team, Immanuel Quickley teed up one of his favourite movies, featuring one of his favourite players.

As the plane took flight, Quickley got lost in Stephen Curry: ‘Underrated’, the documentary that came out this past summer capturing the unlikely rise of the Golden State Warriors guard from short, scrawny and under-recruited as a high school senior to the apex of basketball for most of the past decade.

For Quickley, it was a rewatch. The 24-year-old Raptors guard was a blossoming high school star in Maryland in 2014-15 when Curry won his first MVP award and led the Warriors to the first of their four NBA championships. Quickley caught Curry’s documentary when it came out in the off-season and as the newly acquired Raptor got ready to go head-to-head with his NBA idol as a starter for the first time earlier this week, he dove in again.

For a slender guard who has always relied on skill, Curry has always been an inspiration.

“2015, That was a crazy year,” Quickley said after a Raptors shoot-around earlier on their six-game west-coast road trip. “To see someone 6-foot-3, 190 pounds winning an MVP, it makes you ask yourself: ‘Why can’t I be great? If you have the work ethic, why can’t you go out and accomplish great things? It’s always great to see great players do well, especially players who have the same kind of body type as you, it’s just cool to see that.”

Of course, Quickley could just tap into his phone if he needed some inspiration from the greatest point guard of his generation. The two-time MVP and four-time champ share a common friend, former Warriors and current Knicks assistant Darren Erman, who put Quickley in touch with his idol in his rookie season in New York. Curry’s been a fan and a supporter ever since and sees in the new Raptors guard some of himself. Quickley has kept a voice memo the Warriors star sent him on his phone for years.

For Curry, it’s a matter of game recognizing game.

“It speaks to how long I’ve been around, that you’re playing against guys that watched you through the years and taking bits and pieces of what I do and adding it to their game,” Curry told me after the Raptors downed the Warriors on Sunday night, a game in which Quickley shot just 1-of-4 from three but contributed 10 assists without a turnover in the Raptors blowout win.

“He’s got so much potential in this league and the change of the scenery will be fresh for him,” Curry continued. “He’s got a nice responsibility as a starting point guard now.

“I talked to him once or twice the past couple of years, gave him some words of wisdom and he’s been proactive about reaching out, and that’s been dope.”

It's not always wise to compare players, and even less so to compare a player in Quickley’s shoes – just trying to establish himself as an NBA starter with a new team, midway through his fourth NBA season – to Curry, an icon who will retire as one of the top-10 players in league history.

But it’s not unreasonable to draw parallels and make connections. The Warriors’ star has changed basketball in many respects, but perhaps the simplest way is that he made it acceptable, then desirable and then a virtual necessity for point guards to shoot threes at high volume and from deep range, altering the geometry of the court in the process.

A simple measure:

Prior to Curry’s first MVP season, no point guard had ever averaged eight three-point attempts per game. But once Curry broached eight threes per game for the first time in 2014-15, he and a generation of imitators haven’t looked back. In the nine seasons since, Curry, the NBA’s all-leader in three-pointers made, has averaged 11.1 three-point attempts per game (and made 42 per cent of them).

Since Curry’s ascension, getting eight threes up – at least on a per 36-minute basis – has become almost a job requirement for the game’s best point guards. This season alone, there are eight point guards taking at least eight threes per game, and you’ve heard of all of them: Curry leads the way with 11.5 per game, then there’s Luka Doncic (10.5), Trae Young (9.3), LaMelo Ball (8.9), Damian Lillard (8.6), Tyrese Haliburton (8.6). De’Aaron Fox (8.5) and Tyrese Maxey (8.3).

There are exceptions, of course. Canadian national team star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has put himself at the forefront of the MVP conversation with Oklahoma City while taking just 3.5 threes per game due to his uncanny ability to get to the paint and finish when he’s there, but as a rule, more threes are better, and the game’s best guards are taking a lot.

Through his first six games as a Raptor, Quickley is getting there. He’s putting up 6.5 threes per game, which would be a career-high, but that should rise as his minutes increase. The Raptors big win over the Warriors and foul trouble against the Lakers have him at just 31.2 minutes per game as Toronto closes out its trip against the Utah Jazz on Friday night.

On a per-36-minute basis, Quickley has averaged at least eight threes in four of his five NBA seasons. He certainly has the green light from the Raptors coaching staff to get up more triples. The Raptors have already made Quickley threes a first option on many of their set plays on sideline and baseline out-of-bounds situations and after time-outs.

In the same way, the threat and reality of Curry’s other-worldly shooting bent defences to the Warriors' advantage for years, the Raptors see Quickley as someone who is dangerous whether he gets the ball or not.

A guard with elite three-point shooting skills makes life easier for everyone. Ball screens can be set higher on the floor because the defence can’t afford to sag. When it’s done right it leaves three defenders beneath the ball creating opportunities for big men (if they get the pass after setting the screen) to play with a 4-on-3 advantage, or a ball-handler with as much speed as Quickley attacking the paint, forcing defenders to collapse, and creating more open three-point looks in the process. The Warriors won four championships leveraging the best shooting guard in NBA history doing exactly that.

Another University of Kentucky guard who plays like lighting in a bottle, the Kings' Fox, who sees why the Raptors made a point of trading for Quickley and is confident Toronto is on to something. “Obviously he shoots the hell out of the ball, he can get downhill, I think the sky’s the limit for him,” said Fox after Quickley scored 20 points, made four threes, and added eight assists against Sacramento last Friday. Guards like Curry, Fox, Maxey and – the Raptors hope – Quickley are especially lethal in late in games.

“If you’re trying to close out a game and if teams don't respect you shooting the ball, then they'll give you that,” said Fox, who won the NBA’s inaugural Jerry West Award for clutch play last season. “… [but] if you prove that you can hit that shot after that the world opens up for you because now guys have to come up one or two more steps and that allows you to get downhill, and now bigs have to step up or wings have to come in and it just makes it just makes the game a lot easier for you.”

It should be said: Quickley’s not yet putting himself in Curry’s category, or even Fox’s. After all, he’s yet to make the 30th start of his four-year career since being drafted 25th overall out of the University of Kentucky in 2020. But he’s got ambitions, and having had the opportunity to watch the Warriors star carve out a legendary career as Quickley himself was trying to reach the NBA and then establish his place in it has informed how he plays and what is possible for a smallish (by NBA standards) point guard.

“I don’t know if I’m going to just come down and shoot a half-court three every time,” Quickley says. “But him just having the ability to shoot, I think he changed the game, not only just for me, but for everybody. To be able to shoot the ball is a critical component now, in the game. You have to be able to shoot to stretch the defence out and that opens up driving lanes and creating for you teammates and things like that.”

Quickley certainly has the green light from head coach Darko Rajakovic.

“Every time he has an open look and it comes in the flow of the game, I’m fine with him shooting,” said Rajakovic. “[Against Sacramento] he took his season high, he took 12 [threes] and even in that game I felt he had a couple more that he could have taken. If the defence isn’t doing a good job of picking up or they’re going under [screens] you have to shoot that shot.”

The Raptors really haven’t had a point guard who fits Quickley’s profile. Dennis Schroder’s ability to turn the corner in pick-and-rolls, especially going right, is a tribute to his speed, but his lack of three-point shooting can crowd the floor, especially when paired with Jakob Poeltl, a non-shooting centre. Fred VanVleet was a high-volume three-point threat, but his finishing in the paint and at the rim was lacking, and defences could adjust accordingly. During his best years, Kyle Lowry’s three-point shot was a weapon, but he couldn’t create them off the dribble like Quickley has shown he can.

Increasingly, teams that are going to score at the rate necessary to compete in the NBA’s current high-octane era need a creator who can stretch the defence. It’s perhaps no coincidence that once Curry and the Warriors set the standard, the NBA’s next wave of elite offence has been driven by Curry ‘2.0’ types: Fox and the Sacramento Kings last season and Haliburton and the Indiana Pacers this season.

Arguably the league’s breakout star so far this year has been Maxey with the Philadelphia 76ers, a former teammate of Quickley’s at Kentucky who was one of the first people to text Quickley after the trade. All of them share a combination of lightning speed and deep range that has made them almost as unguardable as Curry himself.

Quickley didn’t grow up playing like a mini-Steph. He had to learn it over time. He says he’s largely a self-taught shooter and says the turning point for him came after a long shooting session – 1000 threes with the help of an automatic ball return – in high school convinced him that he had the chops to launch threes at a high volume, and he’s never looked back.

“The next game I played in I made a whole bunch of threes,” he says. “And that's kind of where I kind of got my I thought that I had [unlocked a] was a secret at that point. But it's no secret. It's really just hard work and repetition.”

There’s no going back.

“With the way the game’s changed so much with shooting, teams definitely have to have someone who's going to stretch the floor, be aggressive at all times and put pressure on the defense,” Quickley said. “Because then that's how everybody else gets good shots. So I tried to keep reminding myself that too, so just trying to stay aggressive.

And if Quickley’s belief ever wavers? He can line up his mentor’s documentary to watch again, or for added inspiration, he can pull up the voice memo on his phone.

“I still got it,” Quickley says. “He just talks about being confident in my game, not being results-based, working hard, things like that. It was pretty cool. That’s one of my favourite things.”