Since being traded to the Philadelphia 76ers last month, Quentin Grimes has been playing the best basketball of his career. In 15 games (12 starts) with the Sixers, Grimes is averaging 19.3 points, 5.2 rebounds, 3.7 assists and 1.5 steals while shooting 50.2 percent from the floor and 37.6 percent from three. Even more impressively, over his last seven games, he’s averaging 26.1 points, five rebounds, 4.4 assists and 2.1 steals, shooting 53.5 percent from the floor and 38.9 percent beyond the arc.
The Mavericks traded Quentin Grimes and a 2025 2nd round pick to the 76ers for Caleb Martin.
Martin has played 3 games for the Mavericks, averaging 2.7 PPG.
Quentin Grimes is averaging 25.7 PPG in March. pic.twitter.com/M2XbNIG13M
— Underdog (@UnderdogFantasy) March 13, 2025
Now, people are wondering whether this recent run is about a role player experiencing an out-of-body heater or is Grimes blossoming into a star before our very eyes?
How Real Is Grimes’ Production?
All season long, the Sixers have been decimated by injuries. It’s especially true lately, as they’ve been without four primary scorers in Tyrese Maxey, Joel Embiid, Paul George and Jared McCain for varying amounts of time.
These absences have opened up opportunities for Grimes to flash his off-the-dribble game – a tool in his arsenal for some time now. As early as December (back when Grimes and Luka Doncic were still on the Dallas Mavericks), I was tweeting about Grimes’ ability to put the ball on the floor and attack. Across his time with the Sixers and Mavericks this season, Grimes has a true shooting percentage of 60 on his drives, which ranks in the 85th percentile league-wide.
What his new gig has offered him is just a bigger platform to show off this gift – going from 3.9 drives per game with the Mavericks to 8.8 with the Sixers.
What we didn’t know about Grimes is he also has some pull-up shooting tricks in his bag. You know that Dyson Daniels fellow, the defensive dynamo some people are saying is the best perimeter stopper in the league? Just the other night Grimes hit him with this tough fadeaway:
This wasn’t a one-off occurrence, either. He made sure to give the greatest shooter of all-time the business during a nationally televised outing, too:
Grimes Is Filling A Necessary Role
Grimes’ scoring surge reminds me of one of my favorite excerpts from Seth Partnow’s book, “The Midrange Theory: Basketball’s Evolution In the Age of Analytics.”
“[T]he worst team in the NBA starts every game with around 80 points, 25 rebounds, and 10 assists. Those stats must be accumulated and awarded over the course of the game. But across the hundred or so possessions in an average contest, a team with five even vaguely plausible NBA players is going to make some shots and get some stops. … A player’s production should be thought of less in terms of the share of these free numbers he accumulates, but rather the amount he adds to the starting pile.”
We see this confusion take place even more frequently in March and April. At this point of the season, a handful of the teams have thrown in the towel and purposefully sit their best players to lose games and improve their draft position (tanking). And because there are still points to be had, players start putting up numbers at rates we’ve never seen from them before.
I fear this is more than likely what is happening with Grimes. He isn’t adding so much to the pile as he is accumulating the floor of numbers you’d see from a modern NBA team. This is especially clear when you watch his process as a primary option.
In this clip, the defense deploys drop coverage against him. In drop coverage, when your defender gets caught on the screen, you’re supposed to either flow into a dribble pull-up or attack the slower big with a downhill drive. Grimes did neither. Instead, he opted for a forced pocket pass, which was bobbled, before turning into an awkward layup sent into the stands.
Here’s another example against drop coverage. This time, his defender completely falls out of the play, leaving the big man in a two-on-one conundrum. All Grimes needs to do is take a dribble to bait the center toward him, so he can hit the pocket pass to his roll man. Unfortunately, Grimes takes one dribble too many and it leads to a turnover.
Most of Grimes’ primary ball-handler possessions end in contested jumpers or decision-making sequences lacking the smoothness you see from players meant to be true NBA-level creators.
Grimes is putting up numbers, but that’s because someone has to and he’s the only man Philadelphia has to do it right now.* This is reinforced by the Sixers’ lack of change in offensive rating when he’s off the floor. Since Grimes joined the squad, their offensive rating only improves by 0.1 points per 100 possessions when he’s on the court, compared to when he’s off it.
(*If you’re wondering why I feel this way about Grimes and not Trey Murphy III, it’s because Murphy is bigger, has better numbers, put them up for a longer period of time and did that during a time when one-third of the league wasn’t tanking.)
Why There’s Still Value In This Production
Now, this isn’t entirely to say Grimes’ career month has been all for not. This experience leaves him better prepared for when he can return to his role as a three-and-D player.
In 2025, the three-and-D label isn’t as limiting. Gone are the days where all this archetype was asked to do was defend their tail off while standing idly in the corner on offense.
No, no. Given all the innovations concocted by modern defense to put ancillary offensive players in uncomfortable situations (the fly-by closeout, blitzing primary offensive players and forcing their teammates to beat them, etc.), role players must be able to attack closeouts and do some creating for themselves.
Largely by virtue of this recent run, Grimes has proven he can fulfill those duties better than most of his peers, which will make him one of the hottest three-and-D commodities on the market when he hits restricted free agency this summer. That’s enough to ensure his stretch of offensive potency carries value beyond merely filling up a box score for a losing team.
