I’d like to direct you to the NBA’s stats page for the month of March, at least as of 11:18 p.m. on March 17. When you sort all players by the number of points they’re scoring on average this month, you see the league’s holy trinity scrunched together in the teens with one unusual name sandwiched between them. Coming in at No. 14, with 26.6 points per game, is Stephen Curry. At No. 16, with 26 points per game, is LeBron James. At No. 17, with 25.9 points per game, is Kevin Durant. Par for the course, right? Three legends all topping 25 points per game this month. Wait, who was that guy you mentioned before, the outlier in that group?
It’s Quentin Grimes, folks, nestled just between Curry and James at 26.4 points per game this month, and if you’ve watched much of the Philadelphia 76ers over the past few weeks you likely consider the comparison to three all-time greats appropriate. For most of the first five years of his career, Grimes was a perfectly serviceable player. He’s been the starting shooting guard on a playoff team and a consistently useful role player for several franchises. Someone you’d be happy to have on your team, but not someone you’d ever expect to build your team around.
But ever since he landed in Philadelphia, he’s been a superstar. Mirages like this can happen. Remember when T.J. Warren turned into Michael Jordan in the bubble? It’s similarly plausible that we’re witnessing the beginning of something, a breakout that could translate into something much bigger for Grimes. Goran Dragić didn’t become a full-time starter until his fifth season, and then became an All-NBA player in his sixth. Kyle Lowry didn’t make his first All-Star team until his ninth season. Chauncey Billups was a journeyman before he was a Finals MVP. Player development isn’t always linear.
So, for lack of a better way of putting this, what’s the deal? What is happening here? What does it mean for Grimes? For the 76ers? And for the teams that don’t currently employ him? Let’s try to figure that out here, starting with Grimes and then working our way outward.
So… is Grimes a star now?
Well, it might be too early to call him a star, but this isn’t just a hot shooting streak. Not only is Grimes shooting “only” 37.7% on 3-pointers, but he is currently sporting by far the lowest 3-point attempt rate of his career. Entering Monday’s action, only 46.2% of his shots as a 76er have come from deep. Everywhere else he’s played, more than half of his shots were triples, and for his career, nearly 65% of his shots have been 3s. He’s already made twice as many 2s as a 76er (85) as he did all of last season.
These aren’t easy looks, either. Let’s go back to his best full season before this one, the 2022-23 campaign for the Knicks. A staggering 89.7% of his field goals were assisted. He was, almost exclusively, a catch-and-shoot player. But in Philadelphia? More than half of his shots (50.4) have been unassisted. Now, that’s not quite a superstar level. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is unassisted on 75.3% of his field goals, the high-water mark in the superstar class. But Grimes is still in pretty good company here. Players like Desmond Bane, Tyler Herro and Coby White are all in his ballpark. All very good scorers Grimes would do well to emulate.
Most of this growth as a self-creator is coming as a driver. Since arriving in Philadelphia, Grimes is averaging 9.3 drives per game and shooting 60.9% on those drives. That field goal percentage isn’t sustainable. Gilgeous-Alexander, the NBA’s drive king, is at 57.9% and even that figure at meaningful volume for a guard is historic.
Grimes is shooting over 70% in the restricted area. That’s MVP territory, and if Grimes keeps it up, well, we’re going to be having a different, more involved conversation a year or two from now. For now, he’s driving at roughly the rate that players like Zach LaVine and Anfernee Simons do. These are players who mix driving and jump-shooting well, and again, players Grimes would be lucky to consider contemporaries. If he keeps scoring in the 97th percentile in terms of isolation efficiency, he easily could.
There’s a reasonable amount of March skepticism going around here. It’s valid. Weird things happen in March. Teams are resting up for the playoffs. Other teams are tanking. It’s not the highest quality basketball even by regular-season standards. But ask the Houston Rockets how much respect they had for Grimes on Tuesday as he torched them for 46 points. In a game that Houston badly needed for seeding purposes, they trapped and face-guarded him on critical possessions.
Now, to be fair, Houston felt comfortable guarding him like this because he’s playing on a tanking roster, but consider the alternative. If Grimes can score 46 with all of the attention that comes with being a No. 1 option, what would he look like with a better team around him? The truth there is complicated. Grimes is never getting relegated to “camp out in the corner” duties again, but it’s unclear just how many shots are available on a roster that includes Joel Embiid, Paul George, Tyrese Maxey, Jared McCain and, potentially, a top-six pick next season. That reality helps create one of the most fascinating divides between player and team in recent NBA history. Right now, Grimes and the 76ers want entirely different things.
The wildly differing incentives between player and team
By now, you’re likely all aware of what’s happening in Philadelphia. If the ping pong balls on lottery night grant the 76ers a pick anywhere between No. 1 and No. 6, they keep it. If their pick comes in at No. 7 or later, it goes to the Oklahoma City Thunder. For a multitude of reasons, they badly need to keep that pick. Grimes, right now, is their biggest impediment to doing so. He is winning them games that they would rather lose.
There’s an irony to this, because as badly as the 76ers need to keep that pick, Grimes is probably better off in a world in which they don’t. Think about the offseason that’s awaiting him. He’s a restricted free agent. It tends to be very difficult for restricted free agents to get paid fair value on the open market because teams with cap space know that their former employer can just match the deal. Therefore, Grimes’ best chance at getting paid is with the 76ers.
That’s where this gets tricky. Philly is already paying max money to Embiid, George and Maxey. The books are already tight. Lottery picks aren’t expensive in the grand scheme of the NBA, but they are when you’re working to avoid one of the aprons. Whether or not Philadelphia has a firm budget set for next season is unclear. Perhaps the 76ers are comfortable going into the second apron. But they likely will have some hard line in the sand, and the longer Grimes keeps this up, the more he’s worth. He should prefer Philadelphia’s books remain as clear as possible so that all of the extra money goes to him rather than a rookie.
It has never been more important to the 76ers to play poorly than it is right now. It has also never been more important to Grimes to play well than it is right now. Their incentives are directly contradicting. Are there steps the 76ers could take against this? Potentially, but none are especially clean. The NBA is keeping a close eye on the team as it relates to the player participation policy at the moment, so pulling him out of the lineup entirely without a legitimate injury isn’t exactly plausible. They could, however, pull him out of games late, just as the Raptors have been doing with some of their key players recently.
The danger in doing so, of course, is that it risks angering Grimes, his agents and the NBPA. He’s trying to set himself up for free agency and limiting his minutes when he’s playing the best basketball of his career would actively make it more difficult to do so. That’s a headache the 76ers probably don’t want. They could work to quietly agree to a new contract unofficially behind the scenes that comes with certain caveats that pertain to the rest of the season, but aside from the fact that any agreement would be unenforceable at this point, the 76ers don’t exactly have a great reputation when it comes to these sorts of backdoor dealings. Ask James Harden what he thinks of Daryl Morey nowadays. While we’ll never know for certain, there have certainly been rumors about broken financial promises there.
So for now, Grimes will probably just continue to play a significant role for the 76ers. If he keeps playing this well, Nick Nurse won’t be able to keep him off of the floor. Philadelphia will probably win a few more games than it wants to. But at least when the dust settles, the Sixers will have the ability to keep this improved version of Grimes on their team long-term. The same can’t be said for his previous employers. So the question here becomes… how badly did they mess up?
Should we be making Nico Harrison jokes right now?
The Luka Dončić trade was and remains one of the most inexplicable decisions any team has ever made. Grimes’ ascent has led some to lump the two moves together as examples of Nico Harrison’s incompetence. The story isn’t quite that simple, though no version of it paints the Mavericks in a favorable light.
Now, the brazenly financial motivations behind Harrison’s decision to trade Grimes do warrant some derision. Grimes is, as we’ve covered, an impending restricted free agent. Caleb Martin, with an ostensibly similar skill set, is locked into a reasonably affordable long-term deal. The single biggest reason the Mavericks swapped Grimes for Martin was cost certainty. There just isn’t another obvious explanation for the decision. Grimes is five years younger than Martin. Neither stood out statistically. Martin has the stronger playoff track record. Grimes had flashed more upside on tape. It was a bad trade, but not for the same reasons that the Dončić deal was.
Nobody knew Grimes was this good. Should the Mavericks have known? Well, maybe, but by that logic, the New York Knicks surely should have known, right? They had him in the building for more than two years. They traded him to Detroit for peanuts at the 2024 deadline. The Pistons had him for a few months and then inexplicably handed him to Dallas on a silver platter in the middle of a necessary Tim Hardaway Jr. cap dump. The Mavericks might be incompetent, but the Knicks and Pistons aren’t. Three teams dumped this guy within a single year.
The decision for the Knicks made some degree of sense. Grimes was quite good as a second-year starter in 2023, but visibly lost confidence when free-agent addition Donte DiVincenzo emerged as New York’s starting shooting guard a year ago. The Knicks had time to rehabilitate his value, but ultimately would have struggled to pay him long-term if he had returned to form. Instead, they turned him into players they thought could help right away. They didn’t, but Bojan Bogdanovic’s contract at least proved useful as a money-matching tool for Mikal Bridges. Ultimately, it’s just hard to imagine Grimes surviving the Bridges and Karl-Anthony Towns trades even if the Knicks had kept him at the 2024 deadline. There was never a starting role there for him once DiVincenzo took his job, and Deuce McBride was clearly ready to become the top bench guard.
Injuries limited him to just six games as a Piston. They were not good ones, as Grimes shot a laughable 9 of 42 from the field. If there were glimpses of his potential in there somewhere, they weren’t evident. The Pistons could have used Grimes this season, but he didn’t exactly fill a need. They knew Cade Cunningham and Jaden Ivey would be their starting backcourt. They took on Hardaway in that Dallas trade, planned to sign Malik Beasley and had Marcus Sasser waiting in the wings. Guard minutes were at a premium. If Grimes had remained with the Pistons, it likely would have been in a smaller role at least to start the season.
So that explains the situation for Detroit and New York. For Dallas, fingers should be pointed at Jason Kidd as much as Harrison. For whatever reason, the coach of the Mavericks just never developed the trust for Grimes that his performance suggests he should have earned. Grimes was having the best shooting season of his career in Dallas. His defense isn’t quite as good as it was at its peak in New York, but he has good tools and at least works hard on that end of the floor. Yet Grimes played inconsistently, averaging 22.8 minutes as a Maverick, but with pretty wild swings depending on team health and game-to-game performance. The Mavericks badly needed someone to step into a bigger scoring role earlier in the season when Dončić and Kyrie Irving were injured. Grimes was sitting right there and Kidd didn’t notice him. That’s a failure on his part as much as trading him is one on Harrison’s.
By all means, consider the trade a disaster for Dallas. It’s not as though the Mavericks are lacking in that department. But this notion that they should have known what he was going to become as a 76er feels a bit unfair. The Knicks and Pistons didn’t know either, nor did the broader basketball-viewing public. There weren’t obvious signs that this was coming, but now Grimes is here. The 76ers have, either through shrewd scouting or sheer, dumb luck landed on one of this season’s breakout players. Clearly, that’s making it harder for them to succeed at the current goal of failing, but down the line, it hopefully gives them another core player to build around moving forward.
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