In Lost-Cause Season, Nets Lost Opportunities To Define Thomas In Advance Of Free Agency
The Nets’ 116-110 defeat at Chicago on Thursday night pretty much put to bed any realistic chance that Brooklyn would go on a run that would challenge for a Play-In Tournament berth, much to the relief of the pro-tanking segment of the team’s fan base.
With 16 games remaining over the season’s final 30 days, Brooklyn (22-44) is deep in playing-out-the-string territory, making discussions about these contests from a micro perspective pointless. Instead, the focus is on the “Who do we want back?” versus “Who should be let go?” analyses.
And there is no one on the Nets who inspires a more divisive debate than mega-scorer Cam Thomas, a pending restricted free agent. As HoopsHype.com’s Michael Scotto noted in a recent SNY podcast, if you ask different NBA executives and scouts where they think Thomas’ next contract this summer will land, “the numbers are all over the place.”
That’s because as Thomas, 23, completes his fourth pro season, we’re still not sure who he is and what he can be.
Another reason this season absolutely sucks from a fan perspective is that Thomas has played only 25 of Brooklyn’s 66 games due to hamstring complications. This was supposed to be the year where he took the leap, right? Only between the absences and the minutes restrictions as part of the Nets’ conservative return to play protocols, you need a detailed film review to see his growth during this campaign.
Oh, we’ve always known what Thomas can do, and that’s accumulate buckets. He’s a three-level scorer and extraordinary shotmaker. His heat checks are the envy of even the game’s brightest stars. But his production is on a whoppingly high shot volume—he’s fifth in the league in usage this season among the 340 players who average at least 15 minutes per game, per NBA.com, up from 14th in 2023-24. Unfortunately, players are also measured by efficiency; Thomas’ numbers this season—43.8% overall, 34.9% from behind the arc—are below league averages.
So, do you consider his 24 points per game average this season a sign of impending greatness, or are they the equivalent of empty calories, the good stats on a bad team mirage? What basketball operations people have to ask themselves before dumping large sums of money into a Thomas commitment is: How much does he really contribute to winning? The Nets are 93-122 when Thomas has seen action over the course of his career, and that includes his first two seasons going 32-16 when Kevin Durant was on the court with him.
That abysmal record, of course, is not entirely his fault, and I’ve defended Thomas at various points when it came to such criticisms as his playmaking. He knows how to pass and every leading scorer in the league takes a handful of bad shots per game. To hold that solely against Thomas seems unfair.
We saw Thomas at his best during the first halves of Brooklyn’s last two games at Cleveland and Chicago, where he got his teammates involved first before attacking when the ball came back to him. Against the Bulls, he set a career high with 10 assists, including eight in the first half when he still managed to put up 15 points.
But you can’t ignore the inconsistencies. In both contests, Thomas’ attitude seemed to shift after intermission. We saw way more ball-stopping and high-degree-of-difficulty hoists at the basket and fewer set-ups for teammates that came open when the defenses loaded up against him. Some of that can be attributed to the zone defenses that tend to perplex Brooklyn Head Coach Jordi Fernandez and the less-than-ideal game shape Thomas is in following the lengthy injury absence.
We also forget that a 23-year old hasn’t seen everything and will make poor decisions. ClutchPoint.com’s Erik Slater posted a stat last week that ranked Thomas 71st out of 74 guards with at least 50 touches per game in touches/potential assist ratio. Want to know how many players in the top 50 were younger than Thomas? Four, and none of them have the weight of Thomas’ offensive responsibilities on their shoulders. His 9.2 turnover percentage is pretty decent considering the usage level.
I’ll also cut Thomas some slack for his defensive efforts this season. The metrics aren’t great and he’s still awful with getting back in transition, but the eye test shows more engagement in his one-on-one assignments and closeouts. Defense is never going to be his calling card, but I haven’t seen him targeted unmercifully as much as in past seasons.
More troubling, however, is that Thomas’s clutch numbers have also been substandard the last two seasons as Brooklyn’s alpha dog. The Nets last five games have all gone down to the wire; Thomas went 1-for-8 when the score was within a five-point margin in the last five minutes, per NBA.com. The only game the Nets won, Monday over the Lakers, was the night Thomas took a load management day.
Not that Thomas was solely culpable for the defeats; D’Angelo Russell’s effort on Thursday was noticeably abominable. Still, these kinds of stats scream “Microwave scorer off the bench”, rather than someone a contending team can trust to have the ball in his hands during crunch time and pay the associating compensation the truly elite stars in this league have earned. Only a die-hard Thomas fan would put him in the same category as players like New York’s Jalen Brunson and Atlanta’s Trae Young, two established closers who are paid commensurately.
The bottom line, then, is: Given what we have gleaned from Thomas’ games this season, what is that worth contract-wise? The Nets are currently the only team in the league projected to have the ability to sign Thomas to a “market value deal” using cap space, which gives them another advantage alongside the offer sheet matching rights that come with his restricted status. A team can tender Thomas a midlevel exception, but the projected nontaxpayer maximum of $14.1 million for Year 1 is only about $2 million more than Thomas’ salary cap hold, which means Nets General Manager Sean Marks should jump at an opportunity to match.
There are so many unknowns that it’s hard to predict how this will end. History—see Joe Harris, Nic Claxton, and Cam Johnson—suggests that Marks does not like to let free agents who have value walk out the door for nothing. But can Marks find a fair long-term deal for Thomas, maybe in the $20-25 million AAV range, that won’t give him the motivation to seek a bet-on-himself contract offer elsewhere such that he can test unrestricted free agency in the 2026 offseason?
The “fairness” of it, of course, is in the eye of the beholder.