Cam Thomas and the Brooklyn Nets are in an inevitable purgatory

Thomas is a great basketball player who has improved every season. But this story was written long before he cursed at Zach Lowe.

Jordan, LeBron, Shai, Giannis, Shaq, Wade, Kobe, Hakeem, Steph, KD, Kawhi, Tatum. That’s the full list of players to post a 30% usage rate and win a championship in the same season since 1982, per Stathead.

You take that inescapable truth, play telephone, put millions of dollars on the table, and eventually, you get a tweet like this…

Cam Thomas is very, very good at basketball. At 21 years old, he scored three straight 40+ point games in the NBA, in a style that evidenced to a national audience why his profile picture is a graphic of him dribbling alongside Kobe Bryant. Here’s another truth. How valuable a player is to an NBA team is not synonymous with how good (or entertaining) that player is.

Paolo Banchero does ten things a game that should be impossible for a 6’10”, 250-pound block of muscle. And yet, at Summer League, I had a conversation with an acquaintance now working in a team’s front office, a basketball mind I respect greatly. He is far from alone in pitying the Orlando Magic, who had no choice but to offer Paolo Banchero a five-year contract that be worth up to $287 million.

He asked me: “Has there ever been a championship team with a player like that?”

Banchero, over three seasons, is rocking a career usage-rate well over 30%, while failing approach to league-average efficiency shooting the ball. So, the answer is no. He will either have to radically change his scoring profile or play style — the latter of which, given the annual salary north of $50 million, seems unlikely — to be a centerpiece of a championship team.

Of course, Banchero is yet to play his age-23 season, and is averaging 29 points per game in his nine playoff appearances so far. My acquaintance (and I) may have to eat crow one day. But for now, it’s unlikely.

If Paolo Banchero ever had the misfortune of reading those paragraphs, he’d feel the same feeling that Cam Thomas (or the family member running his account) felt when reading Lowe’s aggregated quote. As he should.

But Banchero carries a #1 overall pick pedigree. Thomas is currently floundering in restricted free agency as the NBA has shunned the idea of one-dimensional, score-first guards this summer. Hell, look at this past NBA Finals, look at who the Brooklyn Nets drafted with their record-breaking five first-round picks.

And yet, Cam Thomas has done what he’s been asked in his NBA career. In 2024-25, he reached league-average TS% while carrying the heaviest offensive load on the worst team of his four-year career. He’s turned some of his long twos into pull-up threes.

By any measure, he is a far better passer than when he entered the league at 20 years old, specifically in situations where he handles the ball most. He developed real pick-and-roll synergy with Nic Claxton last season, and showcased a healthy variety of dump-off passes, lobs, and the occasional kick-out to a shooter. This was all evident in his final two games of the season, before suffering his third and final left hamstring strain, where he diced up the Cleveland Cavaliers and Chicago Bulls for 51 points, 13 assists, and just four turnovers…

Thomas is no longer “worst defender in the league” level, having graduated to “really bad” with much more room to improve. His decision-making off the ball is still pretty slow, but he is lethal on catch-and-shoot 3-pointers, converting 40.5% of those looks since the beginning of his sophomore season. Given his skillset, his age, and the upward trajectory, CT should be a useful player for an NBA team.

Maybe you disagree. I get that. But Jalen Green, who is a far worse shooter than Thomas but uses superior athleticism to accomplish, um … is making $35 million a year. I’d be mad too.

We don’t give grace to a player whose standout skill is scoring the ball. Not even if he is the all-time leading scorer at Oak Hill Academy, nor if he averaged 23 points per game as a freshman in the SEC. We do this because the bar to be a valuable score-first player on a good NBA team is astronomically high, but we fabricate other reasonings.

There is no way to call a player an “empty calories ball hog” without at least implying they are a selfish player. An undesirable teammate. A player that cares about their own stats more than the success of the team.

Indisputably, Thomas sinks into periods of shot-chucking. When the Nets, who just fielded the fourth head coach and worst roster of CT’s career, would go down by double-digits last season en route to yet another loss behind an inept offense, you could see Thomas realize this sucks, I’m just gonna try to score. I certainly didn’t find it enjoyable to watch, but for a guy whose best skill will never be anything but on-ball scoring, a guy who improved all facets of his game over his rookie contract, I don’t know, I wasn’t that bothered by it.

No, he’s not a good passer yet. He doesn’t read the floor as quickly or score as efficiently as a great 6’4” NBA player needs to. But teammates like him. Coaches like him. The organization, who will never try to do anything but pay players less money — I mean extract surplus value — likes him.

There are plenty of players about as valuable to an NBA team as Cam Thomas is. Most of them just aren’t as good at basketball — have you seen the shots he hits?

Right after Zach Lowe reported the infamous consensus on Thomas, he asked Nekias Duncan what to make of the whole situation. Duncan characteristically responded with five minutes of very nerdy praise for CT, some of the most flattering analysis of his game that’s been spoken on any national platform.

Lowe added: “I’ve always said, ‘there’s something here with Cam Thomas. There’s something.’ And he did grow. I just don’t have any faith that — I still think the something is, this is a guy that can come off the bench on a good team and just go nuts for five minutes while the best players are resting and hopefully carry our offense. I’m not sure that I want him starting at any point on a good team.”

Here are two vital questions to consider. Is Cam Thomas good enough to be a leading ball-handler and/or scorer on a great team? If he’s in a supporting role, where’s he making a positive impact?

You can probably sense where I stand. But let me throw a couple more questions at you.

If fellow #27 overall pick Danny Wolf turns out to be as valuable as Thomas by the end of his rookie contract, would Brooklyn Nets fans be happy? And if Thomas had gotten taken in the top-ten of the 2021 NBA Draft instead of falling to the end of the first round, would he be stuck in free agent purgatory four years later?

Is this what Cam Thomas and the Brooklyn Nets deserve? Or is life just unfair?

Probably both.