Quentin Grimes almost had his signature moment.
He collected the ball on the wing. Drove on Isaiah Hartenstein. Finished a layup around Precious Achiuwa. And with 37 seconds remaining, Grimes — the Knicks’ former first-round pick — gave the Pistons, his new team, a one-point lead.
That all changed when Josh Hart made a layup after a controversial no-call and the Pistons ended up losing, 113-111, on Monday at the Garden.
But in his return to the team that gave him an NBA start, which also coincided with just his second game back from a knee injury, Grimes orchestrated a 14-point scoring burst in the fourth quarter that kept Detroit within striking distance.
“I felt like once I got that bucket, we just had to come up with a rebound,” Grimes said.
He nearly did that himself. Jalen Brunson missed a 3-pointer with 18 seconds remaining, and the ball careened toward the corner by the Pistons’ bench. Grimes chased after it.
He leapt into the air and twirled around, trying to throw it to someone — anyone — wearing a white Pistons jersey.
Simone Fontecchio caught it for a brief moment. But then Hartenstein knocked the ball loose, and chaos unfolded — with the no-call and the pass to Hart and his game-winning layup.
Grimes had the “extra oomph” when he woke up Monday morning.
“I really don’t look at it like, ‘Oh, I got to go off or something,’” he told reporters after the Pistons’ shootaround, but Grimes knew the stakes. These were the Knicks. This was the Garden. His departure, via the trade, had happened earlier this month before the trade deadline, a reality that Grimes accepted in the days leading up to the Knicks-Pistons deal.
“I knew it was going to happen. I didn’t know it would be Detroit. It was a few teams,” Grimes told reporters Monday morning. “But I knew it was going to happen, for sure.”
So it was poetic when Grimes nearly led the Pistons to a rare victory.
He collected more than half of their points in the fourth quarter.
When Detroit strung together stops and rebounds, causing Grimes to continue running up and down and up and down the court, he got his “legs back into me.”
The knee injury had sidelined him leading up to the trade, and that absence continued even after he arrived in Detroit.
He returned Saturday, and despite not scoring across the first three quarters two days later, Grimes hit a 3-pointer at the start of the fourth.
Then, former Knicks teammate Evan Fournier kicked a pass to him for another 3-pointer later in the frame, and his final 3 of the period gave the Pistons a 106-104 lead.
And in the final minute, Grimes almost stole the game from his former team.
He nearly turned the Garden into his stage to prove what the Knicks had lost in their quest to win a title. Hart, though, spoiled the ending.
“He definitely probably had a chip on his shoulder,” Pistons forward Ausar Thompson said. “He didn’t say nothing about it, at least to me, though, but you know he just wanted to prove something.
