A whole lot remains up in the air when it comes to 25-year-old Quentin Grimes.

Welcome to our Sixers player preview series, where in the weeks leading up to Media Day we will preview the upcoming 2025-26 season for each and every member of the Sixers' standard roster. For each player, we will pose two key questions about their season before making a prediction.

The pressure is on after a miserable 24-58 campaign last season. After entering a year with championship aspirations and spending multiple months having to tank for the sake of a protected first-round pick, the Sixers have lost any and all benefit of the doubt that their signature season is finally coming.

It is safe to say there is a whole lot of work to do on the Sixers' end to prove the doubters wrong. Do they have a roster good enough to make it happen?

Up next: Quentin Grimes, who after months of restricted free agency... is still unsigned. Training camp is days away, and the Sixers have still failed to find a resolution on the 25-year-old guard whose scoring breakout turned plenty of heads after he was acquired from the Dallas Mavericks at the trade deadline. Grimes profiles as an obvious starting guard on this year's Sixers, but first he has to actually put pen to paper on a contract. Can the Sixers secure Grimes' services and then find an ideal role for him?

As much as Grimes' return to the Sixers still feels like an inevitability, it is impossible to ask any basketball-centric question before this one. Most members of the roster are already sharing the court(s) at the team's Camden practice facility, and the official work begins this weekend. The Sixers will end the weekend by boarding a flight to Abu Dhabi, the site of their two preseason exhibitions against the New York Knicks on Oct. 2 and Oct. 4.

Will Grimes be on that flight?

Grimes still being unsigned represents a missed opportunity in multiple respects. The vast majority of Grimes' soon-to-be teammates are developing chemistry already, but he is not getting up to speed with a significant number pieces with whom he is largely unfamiliar. On top of that, the extent of Grimes' own offseason work is unknown, as many players awaiting new contracts must refrain from significant basketball activity to ensure their eventual earnings are not jeopardized by an injury.

Media Day on Friday and the following two days of practice before departing for Abu Dhabi feel like the key dates in all of this. If Grimes does not get on that flight to Abu Dhabi, he will end up missing at least the first week of official team activities after missing multiple weeks of unofficial team activities.

There is still no reason to expect Grimes to join another team. There is effectively zero cap space out there at this point; even if there was the Sixers have the right to match any offer sheet the 25-year-old signs with another team. Grimes has every right to drag this process on for as long as he can in hopes of creating a sense of desperation from the team, but the guess here remains that the Sixers will hold the line and secure a team-friendly deal with Grimes.

The idea behind trading for Grimes was that he could serve as a quality off-ball player next to the Sixers' many high-usage players. But with all of Joel Embiid, Paul George, Tyrese Maxey and Jared McCain unavailable for most of Grimes' two-month stint with the team, an elite spot-up three-point shooter was suddenly forced into a role featuring a massive amount of ball-handling. Grimes, citing his experience playing point guard in high school, was confident that he could pay off the opportunity to display his ball skills.

Grimes did just that, to a remarkable degree: he showed improved playmaking chops when asked to be a primary ball-handler and was a dynamic three-level scoring threat when asked to handle an enormous workload in terms of shot attempts. It may have come in low-stakes games, but Grimes played with one or two NBA-caliber teammates at a time and routinely carved up opposing defenses on high efficiency marks.

Grimes will almost certainly never average 16.4 field goal attempts per game again as he did in 28 appearances with the Sixers to close out 2024-25. But after arriving in Philadelphia with the profile of a fourth or fifth offensive option any time he was on the floor, Grimes now looks like someone that can be at or near the center of an offensive gameplan for stretches within games. That is a massive boost to his preexisting 3&D skillset.

The Sixers have multiple injury-prone players at the top of their roster; the best way to manage that is having role players whose offensive usage can be scaled in either direction at any time. That is what the Sixers now have in Grimes.

So, if Embiid, George, Maxey and McCain are all on the floor, there should not be any doubt that Grimes can impact winning. Even if his ball-handling chances are sporadic, Grimes is a gifted shooter not only on spot-ups but also after coming off a screen with two or three dribbles.

This is the sort of stuff the Sixers likely envisioned when they traded for Grimes, before Embiid's season had come to a premature end:

As he leads a team that could very well have moving parts for the entirety of the season, Sixers head coach Nick Nurse needs as much lineup and strategic optionality as he can get. With his perimeter defensive ability, stellar shooting stroke and recent development on the ball, Grimes offers that flexibility in spades.

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The Sixers finally get a deal done with Grimes right as camp is about to officially open, and he slots into the team's starting lineup. Grimes shows that his late-season scoring surge in 2024-25 was not a complete aberration and establishes himself as a multi-faceted, starting-caliber player in the NBA. Grimes becomes the Sixers' most appetizing realistic trade asset in the process.

Grimes is in a bind here; no matter how long the situation has dragged on the leverage has remained in the hands of the Sixers. The team should not drastically improve its offers to Grimes simply to ensure he boards the flight to Abu Dhabi, but at some point a ticking clock will force the two sides to come to a resolution.

Unless Grimes wants to remain unsigned into the season - by that point, the Oct. 1 deadline for him to accept his qualifying offer will have passed - this bizarre negotiation will come to an end soon.

If they indeed get done a long-term deal, the Sixers should then be thrilled about the player they are locking in - not just as a cost-effective contributor, but as a controllable trade asset with significant value.

No matter how anyone feels about the legitimacy of Grimes' scoring surge last season, he has already demonstrated several skills that every team covets in its role players. Clearly, though, Grimes possesses genuine upside beyond that. His versatility, scalability and youth all make him an intriguing commodity for any team trying to bolster its rotation.