The Quentin Grimes Thing Is Getting Weird

The Sixers have a lot of unanswerable questions this season. Here's one it would be nice to actually see answered.

(No audio because I have no voice today, apologies.)

As Sixers fans, we're pretty accustomed at this point to dealing with a team with more question marks than a Matthew Lesko suit. Our two best (or at least highest-paid) players are currently sidelined for reasons no one can completely understand or explain the totality of, and queries about when they might return are generally met by Nick Nurse and Daryl Morey with the vague words and obvious frustration of an overworked mother being asked by her five-year-old when dinner is going to be ready. No one totally gets why the team was as bad as they were last year, or why the team generally can't ever look competent without their best player; "Can the Sixers be a .500 team without Embiid?" is entering Ancient Sixers Proverb territory.

But that's fine, in as much as anything is ever fine with the Sixers and our rooting for them. We get it. We have to embrace the unknown with the post-Process Sixers — not really in a just-enjoy-the-ride sense, but in more of a what-fucking-choice-will-we-ever-even-have sense. We don't ask for some deeper explanation for all the smaller things we don't understand; we understand that it's all random and cruel and likely ultimately meaningless. We accept all that. It's chill. Relatively.

Still, the Quentin Grimes question mark is getting kinda annoying. That's one we really should have been able to answer by now.

Quentin Grimes, lest we forget, spent about a month and a half last season as the Sixers' best player. Says more about the ultimately 24-58 Sixers' decrepitude than about Grimes himself, of course, but it also says a bunch about Grimes. He broke out in early March with that 44-point Saturday night performance against Golden State — leading Philly to its first win in a month — and we thought for sure it would go down in Sixers lore as The Quentin Grimes Game, as memorable for its unlikeliness as its excellence. Then Q spent the next six weeks proving it shockingly un-anomolous, averaging nearly 26 points a game over his next 20 (on strong shooting numbers and efficient free-throw drawing) and even outdoing his 44-pointer against Golden State with 46 in an overtime game in Houston. They lost that game, as they lost the overwhelming majority of those 20 — that was sorta the point by then — but Quentin, picked up at the trade deadline as a role player, had officially Broken Out.

Grimes is undoubtedly one of the players I'm most excited to watch on the Sixers next year. Except it's not at all for sure that I'm going to be able to watch him on the Sixers next year. And not for the usual vocabulary-expending Sixers injury-related reasons, but because two months into the offseason, he's still an unsigned restricted free agent. His re-signing was treated in the pre-offseason as a formality and an inevitability, but here we are in late August and the inevitable has yet to evit. The slop on him has curdled, and I'd imagine at this point both Daryl and Grimes himself occasionally forget that he still has to actually sign on the line that is dotted.

And for the most part, I suppose that's not tragic. It's not like there are other teams with a Quentin Grimes-sized hole on their roster and payroll that are just waiting to scoop him up the second he decides it's not happening with Philly — by all reports, the free agency market for QG is essentially nonexistent, and the Sixers are essentially bidding against themselves. Besides, it's still only First August for the Sixers, which means we have at least two or three more Augusts to go before we have to actually start taking the next season seriously as a real thing that's actually going to happen. Grimes remaining unsigned at least means we still have something to talk about; I won't act like I'm not decently grateful for the content opportunity.

We'll Know Very Early This Season If Nick Nurse Has Learned Anything

But I still don't like it. We should be past the asterisk point of roster discussion with the team at this point in the calendar. "If Embiid and George are healthy" is already more than enough of a qualifier in debating the team's potential this season, it's ridiculous that we still have to add "If Quentin Grimes actually turns out to still be a Sixer" on top of that. Perhaps it's just a matter of settling on a number that the parties aren't as far apart on as we worry — I'm definitely running the hurry-up offense while writing this article just in case he ends up singing while I'm adding links to the post or whatever — but until then, I will certainly be at least a little freaked out about this whole thing getting Sixersed, where somehow how ends up signing with the Heat and we end up inking P.J. Tucker for forward depth instead. Not likely but not impossible.

Mostly, I just want us to be able to get a chance to see Quentin Grimes to play on a real Sixers team. Great as he was at season's end, those games were basically Summer League pre-season outings; for them to end up being Grimes' sole Sixers legacy would be like hearing some incredible guitarist in a band's soundcheck but finding out he left the band before the actual gig. Maybe he'll disappoint, maybe he'll prove redundant, maybe he'll never pop again like he did last year against Golden State and Houston. But I wanna know that we're definitely gonna get the chance to find out. We already have enough to wonder about with this Sixers team that we'll probably never be able to totally stop wondering about. We deserve to get an actual period on this one, and soon.

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Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.