In early October the starting job looked like Quentin Grimes’s to lose. We argued on Oct. 2 that he should start and that only a bad preseason would change it, and we named the two things that would prove us wrong: his three-point shooting staying near 33 percent, or Matisse Thybulle staying healthy and defending well enough that JJ Redick chose defense over spacing.
The second one happened, and then some. Thybulle has been available for every game and is 7-of-15 from three — Redick never had to trade spacing for defense, because Thybulle has supplied both. Ziaire Williams, who started ahead of Grimes as well, is 5-of-12. The shooting argument, the one everybody spent the summer making, turned out not to be the argument at all.
Redick Has Opened All Three Games With the Same Five Players
Grimes has played 78 minutes for the Los Angeles Lakers this season and has not started a game. Redick has used Luka Dončić, Austin Reaves, Ziaire Williams, Matisse Thybulle and Walker Kessler to open all three, and the Lakers have won all three.
Grimes has scored 26 points across them: 10 on 4-of-7 shooting in the opener against Golden State, 13 points and seven rebounds against the Los Angeles Clippers, and three points in 20 minutes at Utah. He is 3-of-8 from three.
The Collin Sexton Explanation Did Not Survive Collin Sexton’s Return
When Redick first moved Grimes out of the lineup in the preseason finale, he pointed at the backcourt: “That fourth ballhandler for us hasn’t been great,” he told Broderick Turner of the Los Angeles Times. We took that at face value on Oct. 17 and wrote that Grimes’s role depended on Sexton’s leg rather than his own play.
Sexton made his Lakers debut on Oct. 23 against the Clippers. Grimes played 30 minutes and 34 seconds that night, his season high. The bench role did not come back when Sexton did, which means it was never really about Sexton.
Grimes Has Out-Played the Man Who Starts Ahead of Him
Here is the part the lineup card hides: Grimes has played more minutes than Thybulle. Across three games it is 78:19 to 73:03. Redick is starting Thybulle and finishing with Grimes, which is a rotation decision dressed up as a lineup decision.
That is defensible. Thybulle’s job is to take the opposing guard for the first six minutes of each half; Grimes, who said in October that the four-year deal took the pressure off, is the better bet to still be on the floor when a game is close. Starting is a status; minutes are the job.
Twenty Minutes in Utah Is the Number to Watch
The problem is the trend inside the trend. Grimes went 27 minutes, then 30, then 20. The Utah night was the one where Dončić scored 52 and Redick leaned on the players who were making shots, and Grimes was not one of them.
Grimes signed for four years and $60 million with a player option in the last year, per Shams Charania of ESPN. Thybulle is on a one-year minimum deal and Williams on one year at $3 million. A team can live with its fourth-highest-paid player coming off the bench. It cannot live with his minutes moving 10 at a time depending on whether his jumper is falling, and three games in, that is what the usage looks like.
Sources: box scores via Basketball-Reference; contract terms via Hoops Rumors, reported by Shams Charania of ESPN.
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