Whether you’re enjoying this tank or not, we’re certainly revisiting a lot of discussions we haven’t had in nearly a decade.
Perhaps one of the more challenging parts of The Process days was deciphering whose production was legitimate and whose stats were empty. At the end of the day, points are going to appear on the scoreboard, even for the worst teams. Determining if they got there in a way that is sustainable for a good team in the future is the difficult task, particularly with guards.
Michael Carter-Williams was a lottery pick and won Rookie of the Year with the Sixers in 2013-14. He was then traded at the following deadline in what ended up being the perfect sell-high from Sam Hinkie as Carter-Williams bounced around from team-to-team from the 2014-15 trade deadline until 2023 and is now not even in the NBA.
However, there are obviously a few success stories from The Process as well. We’ll stick to the guard theme and point out that undrafted free agent T.J. McConnell also logged a ton of minutes in the backcourt on some awful Sixers teams. He stuck around for some of the team’s first playoff appearances with Joel Embiid. He has become a regular rotation player for an Indiana team that got to the conference finals last year and will be back in the playoffs this season.
As this season’s Sixers play out the string with the entire fanbase seemingly now united in achieving the highest amount of ping-pong ball combinations heading into the May draft lottery, this conversation is once again resurfacing surrounding newly-acquired guard Quentin Grimes. On Wednesday night in Toronto, Grimes appeared in his 15th game of the season for Philly after being traded away from Dallas last month. The 29-point effort from the 24-year-old was his fifth game with at least 25 points in the month of March, a month that isn’t even halfway over. It is worth noting however that Grimes turned the ball over six times — a season high — and only had three assists in the 118-105 loss to the Raptors.
Whether it’s Carter-Williams, McConnell or Grimes, getting to the bottom of the statistical profiles of guards on bad teams is clearly a challenge. Guards are the ones with the ball in their hands more often than not on offense. Bigs do a lot of their scoring off of dump-offs in the paint or catching and shooting from the midrange or three-point area. The worse off the roster is, the more the chief scoring guards on any team are likely going to look to take matters into their own hands. No one is disputing how good Tyrese Maxey is but it is worth noting, and not surprising, that Maxey’s 21 field goal attempts per game this season are a career high.
As it pertains to Grimes, his usage rate has gone up considerably since joining the Sixers. It was at 18.5% in Dallas and currently sits at 24.1% in Philadelphia. Even the season-long aggregate rate between both teams of 20.3% is his highest full-season usage rate of his career by close to five percentage points as his previous usage high was 15.8% last season, one that he also spent with two different teams having started the year in New York before finishing it in Detroit.
Even if he’s padding the stat sheet some, there’s reason to be optimistic about Grimes’ legitimately rounding into form as he enters his mid 20s. First off, just look at the 18.5% usage rate as a Maverick this season. That’s up over three percentage points from his usage rate in 2023-24 with New York and Detroit. While 2024-25 hasn’t gone according to plan for Dallas, Grimes appeared to be finding a bit of a niche on a team that was in the NBA Finals last season. Even before he was traded, Grimes was carving out a role for himself in Dallas, contributing admirably on both ends of the floor. Acquiring Grimes last month was exactly the kind of move Daryl Morey and the rest of the front office needed to make in an effort to get younger and salvage a future piece from this abysmal season.
Between his time in Dallas and Philadelphia, Grimes is shooting 47.8% from the field and if he can stay above 46.8% for the rest of the season, he’ll have a career year in the field goal percentage department. He is currently at 60.5% from a true shooting percentage standpoint, which is slightly below the 61.9% true shooting percentage he posted in 2022-23 with the Knicks. That 2022-23 season in New York is one we should also highlight if anyone thought that his production in either Dallas or Philadelphia was inflated. Grimes appeared in 71 games and started 66 of them for a Knicks team that went 47-35 and made it to the second round of the playoffs. He had played well enough to go from a bench player to a starter and rather than being retained by the Knicks, was used at the 2024 deadline as a trade chip which can often be the case with younger players on contending teams looking to acquire more established rotation players for the stretch run.
We should note, changes of scenery are nothing new for Grimes as he experienced similar changes both in team and in role in college. Grimes was a five-star recruit out of high school and a McDonald’s All-American. Unlike some highly-rated recruits, Grimes did not hit the ground running in college. During his freshman season at Kansas, he started all 36 games he appeared in. But he contributed sparingly and shot just 38.4% from the field and wound up transferring to Houston at the end of the season. In his first season as a Cougar, Grimes started 21 out of the 30 games he played in, but his numbers were better across the board. His second season at Houston, he started every game and was a third team All-American selection in addition to being named the co-Player of the Year in the American Athletic Conference. As you can see, it took Grimes some time to find his footing in college, and he had to endure some change, but he became a high-level player by the time his collegiate career was over.
To sum it all up, Grimes looks like more of a player that just had to find the right situation for himself than a stat-padder. He’s shown enough promise in New York and Dallas to make fans believe the right combination of coaching and teammates around him would allow Grimes to settle down somewhere. It’s unrealistic to expect his statistical performance of this season, specifically in Philadelphia, will continue on what we all hope are some more winning Sixers teams. But he should be the top priority for Morey and company this summer when it comes to the team’s free agents. Arguments can be made that both New York and Dallas moved on from Grimes too soon and the Sixers must not make the same mistake. They need to be the ones to empower Grimes to get the most out of him on a consistent basis.
That’s the biggest difference between what Grimes is currently doing and what Carter-Williams and McConnell were doing during The Process. We’ve seen Grimes have success in small stints elsewhere. There’s enough talent in his game for the right franchise to unlock him and have a guard good enough to start for contending teams. If the Sixers return to contention in future seasons and Grimes is a part of it, this season will have at least given us something good.