AROUND the NBA:

[KillerLeft]

There has to be something not quite right about Grimes.  Besides the fact that he gets traded a lot, the teams that move on from him don't get much for him.  

He was highly touted in NY once upon a time.  Then they paid two seconds to send expirings Flynn, Fournier and Arcidiacono to Detroit for expiring Alec Burks and expiring old man Bogdanovic.  No one played for the team they were traded to the next season.  If you take out the supposed benefit of the short term rentals, NY basically paid Detroit 2 seconds to take Grimes.

A few months later Detroit traded him for THJ and two seconds.  Note that THJ didn't stick with Detroit once his contract was up.  Again, a rental, but Detroit got paid the seconds...mainly because of the difference in salary the trade created.

A few months later Dallas was willing to pay a second to swap expiring Grimes for 3 years of Caleb Martin.  

Despite fairly good numbers at times, no one seems to want to pay Grimes and the assets it takes to get him when he's traded are less than impressive.  At the time it all happened, it made sense to move from Green to Grimes and from THJ to Klay.  Green finally got to start and saw his usage actually go down on a bad team.  And, as mentioned, THJ was a rental and is now a Vet Min.  But, Klay and Martin don't seem to be the answer either...especially at guard.  Because of his status around the league, you can't just ship Thompson off to some cellar dweller.   Meanwhile, Martin looks like someone who is going to really be costly from a tax standpoint if he's indeed the 12th man or so on the depth chart.

Totally. It's Christian Wood, all over again. There's some sort of disconnect between the player fans think he is, the player the league wants him to be, and the player HE thinks he is/wants to be. Could it be any more obvious at this point that he has overplayed his hand in these latest negotiations? 

One thing that always strikes me is that fans tend to think players are what they are. They think everyone who can score 20 per game does score 20 per game. I think it's much more structured than that, and featured roles go to who the teams want playing them for a wide variety of reasons. I imagine there are tons and tons of players who could've put up the numbers Grimes did for injured, tanking Philly, had they been dropped into that situation. 

Further, the salaries are more connected to those roles than to what players can do, in a way. It just seems so obvious to me that Grimes believes his career should be on some sort of Dwayne Wade track, when the league and fans are screaming about how good he is (or would be) if he would just see himself as Danny Green, KCP, etc. 

I predict that no matter what he ends up signing for in Philly (it will be much less than what he thinks he deserves), he will fall out of favor with the coaches and they'll move on from him pretty quickly.