Quentin Grimes will finish the 2024-25 regular season as one of the NBA’s most improved players, bar none. And yet, he has absolutely no chance to win this year’s Most Improved Player award.
The honor, in all likelihood, will go to Evan Mobley or Cade Cunningham or Christian Braun or Dyson Daniels, without an outside chance of Ivica Zubac getting some love.
Grimes, though? He deserves consideration, perhaps even a top-three placement. You can make the case for him to win the whole darn thing if you wanted to with an entirely straight face. It’s just not happening.
The reason isn’t what you think it is…
A push-back against Grimes’ place in Most Improved Player discussions is predictable. “He didn’t really pop until he joined the Philadelphia 76ers, and twenty-something games isn’t the entire season!”
This sentiment is, to some extent, fair. Grimes’ per-game numbers did not explode until he arrived in Philly, where he’s clearing 20 points, 4.5 assists and 1.5 steals per game while draining more than 39 percent of his triples. (He’s also convertin on over 57 percent of his twos.) The only other player hitting these benchmarks over the same span — Tyrese Haliburton.
This is in stark contrast to the production Grimes put up with the Dallas Mavericks. His scoring average (10.2 points) wasn’t even a career-high. Still, by the end of his time in Dallas, he entrenched himself inside one of the league’s deepest rotations while shooting a career high from three and tackling some of the tougher defensive assignments. His performance then was a clear notch or five above a 2023-24 campaign initially marred by an ambiguous spot in New York’s rotation, and then by right knee issues in Detroit.
If you pool together Grimes’ body of work from Dallas and Philadelphia this season, he still has authored one of the league’s largest individual leaps. Not only has he doubled up on his full year’s scoring average from 2023-24, but among all 480 qualified players, nobody has increased their self-created shot-making efficiency or box-creation score (a measure of open shots carved out for teammates by drawing defensive attention) by a larger margin than the 24-year-old, according to BBall Index.
Here is why Grimes really won’t win
None of this is meant to act as the Most Improved Player be-all. Much of it speaks to the low baseline off which Grimes is working. But that’s not enough to disqualify him. You can say the same for Dyson Daniels and Ty Jerome, both of whom are routinely mentioned as viable candidates.
Even if Grimes’ stint in Philly is fueling the largest part of his ascent, it is still pronounced enough to stand out over the course of the entire season. That should cement him as a Most Improved Player option at the very least.
It won’t.
And the rulebook is to blame.
Candidates must tally at least 65 appearances to earn consideration. Grimes is currently sitting at 67 games, which meets that threshold. But as The Athletic’s John Hollinger recently reminded us, there is another layer to the criteria that proves damning: Players have to log at least 20 minutes in 63 of those qualifying games.”
Grimes is just barely going to miss this benchmark. He currently has 57 games 20 or minutes under his belt. Even if his back issue doesn’t sideline him for the rest of the year, the Sixers do not have enough remaining games on their schedule for him to reach the magic number of 63.
To what end this matters for Grimes, specifically, is debatable. (He isn’t the only one impacted, either. Ty Jerome will be ineligible as well.) Philly’s pre-deadline find remains in line for a sizable raise once he enters restricted free agency. Failing to qualify for Most Improved Player should severely damage whatever market might exist outside the Sixers.
If anything, this arcane caveat ensures Philly won’t need to pay through the teeth more than it already will. The Sixers can point to the inherent uncertainty of post-trade-deadline breakouts, and won’t have to acknowledge any sort of Most Improved Player-voting share as part negotiations.
This tidbit is more so just a reminder that hey, Quentin Grimes is really good; there’s just no way to formally recognize him for it.
Dan Favale is a Senior NBA Contributor for FanSided and National NBA Writer for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Bluesky (@danfavale), and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, co-hosted by Bleacher Report's Grant Hughes.