In today’s SI:AM:
⚠️ March Madness teams to avoid
✅ How to pick women’s upsets
⛹️♀️ WNBA draft prospects to watch
Another Jalen Brunson situation for the Mavs?
The Dallas Mavericks are really hurting right now. Literally.
The Mavs’ injury report these days is about as long as War and Peace. It’s gotten so bad that Dallas could soon face the prospect of forfeiting games due to not having enough healthy players. The Mavs have had several games in recent weeks where they’ve only had the league minimum of eight players active. Two of their remaining healthy bodies are players on two-way contracts (Kessler Edwards and Brandon Williams) who are quickly approaching the NBA maximum for games on the active roster for two-way players. Once they hit that limit, the Mavs might be literally unable to field a team. The team has reportedly asked the league for salary cap relief so it can sign reinforcements since it is just $51,000 under the first apron hard cap, but the league hasn’t budged.
So right about now would be a good time for the Mavs to have a player like Quentin Grimes, who went off for a career-best 46 points on Monday night—while playing for the Philadelphia 76ers.
Dallas acquired Grimes in a trade with the Detroit Pistons last summer in exchange for Tim Hardaway Jr. and a trio of second-round draft picks. The Mavs then shipped Grimes to the Sixers in early February in exchange for Caleb Martin. (Martin is—you guessed it—hurt. He missed Dallas’s game on Sunday with a hip injury.)
Grimes is in his fourth season in the NBA, having begun his career with the New York Knicks before they traded him to Detroit at last year’s deadline for Bojan Bogdanović. He’s primarily been a bench player and has averaged just 9.8 points per game for his career. But ever since leaving Dallas, Grimes has been on a tear.
Things are grim for the Sixers, too. They have lost 15 of their last 18 games and on Monday decided to shut down Paul George for the rest of the season, three weeks after Joel Embiid was also ruled out. Tyrese Maxey has also missed the last eight games with a back injury.
A litany of other injuries led the Sixers to field a hodgepodge starting lineup on Monday night against the Houston Rockets. Grimes got the start (his 14th in 17 games with Philadelphia) alongside four youngsters and journeymen with skimpy NBA résumés. The other four starters (Oshae Brissett, Justin Edwards, Jared Butler and Ricky Council IV) entered the game with a combined 72 career NBA starts.
Grimes took advantage of a rare opportunity to be the primary scoring option and erupted for 46 points on 15-of-27 shooting (8-of-14 from three) to go along with 13 rebounds and four assists. It wasn’t enough for the shorthanded Sixers, who lost 144–137.
Taking Grimes’s whole career into account, it was an outlier performance—a 46-point outburst for a guy averaging fewer than 10 points per game in more than 200 career games. But compared to what Grimes has done since arriving in Philadelphia, it’s almost par for the course. He had previously shattered his career high with 44 points in a win over the Golden State Warriors on March 1. Since entering the starting lineup on Feb. 12, he’s averaging 23.4 points per game. He’s had 15 games in his career in which he’s scored at least 25 points. More than half of them (eight of the 15) have come in the 14 games he’s started for the Sixers.
“It’s cool,” Grimes said after Monday’s game. “But I had a costly turnover that cost us the game late in the fourth. I have to be better in those situations, probably on the ball, try to get fouled. It’s cool and all, but we probably should have just ended the game, ended it with a win. But we are moving on.”
Having Grimes go off in a loss is probably the ideal result for the Sixers, who are perfectly content to tank for a higher draft pick and look toward the future. He’s shown over the past month that he could be a great complement to Maxey in the backcourt moving forward. That is if the Sixers are able to keep him, as Grimes will be a restricted free agent after this season. His current hot streak for a depleted Sixers team should end up earning him a much bigger payday than he would have gotten otherwise—and make the Mavs kick themselves a little harder for letting him go.
The best of Sports Illustrated
• Kevin Sweeney thinks these five men’s tournament teams are in the most danger of an early exit.
• Dan Falkenheim has a data-driven look at how to pick upsets in your women’s bracket.
• Zach Koons picked the 10 first-round women’s games most worth watching.
• With the WNBA draft just eight days after the women’s national championship game, Clare Brennan has a helpful guide to the best draft prospects playing in March Madness.
• Elizabeth Swinton spoke with top NBA draft prospect Dylan Harper about the disappointing season Rutgers had. Still, Harper says he has no regrets about choosing to play for the Scarlet Knights.
• Conor Orr laid out four reasons why the Vikings should sign Aaron Rodgers.
• Orr, Albert Breer, Gilberto Manzano and Matt Verderame debated which NFL free agent signing will make the biggest impact.
• Freddie Freeman was a late scratch from the lineup for the Dodgers’ opener in Tokyo due to a rib injury.
• Blue Jays pitcher Max Scherzer’s availability for Opening Day is in question due to a lingering injury.
The top five…
… moments from the Dodgers-Cubs opener in Tokyo:
5. The amazing Pokemon-themed pregame introductions.
4. This nifty mixed reality replay system that Fox debuted.
3. The highly anticipated showdown between Japanese stars Shohei Ohtani and Shota Imanaga to open the game.
2. The Dodgers’ first hit of the game by—who else?—Ohtani. Imanaga didn’t allow a hit in his four innings of work, and it took until the fifth for the Dodgers to finally break through against Ben Brown.
1. Dodgers free-agent signing Tanner Scott’s high fastball to blow away top Cubs prospect Matt Shaw for the final out.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | Another Mavs Castoff Is Shining Elsewhere.
