Cam Thomas’ months-long standoff with the Nets is finally over, with the restricted free agent signing the qualifying offer to stay in Brooklyn.
It’s a case of Thomas and the Nets failing to reach an agreement on a new deal, and Thomas betting on himself.
Again.
By exercising the one-year, $5.99 million qualifying offer, Thomas left considerable money on the table in hopes of getting more next summer as an unrestricted free agent. Did he also signal that his tenure in Brooklyn could be coming to a close?
The news — first reported by ESPN and confirmed by The Post — comes after a lengthy contract standoff between the Nets and their leading scorer.
The Post first reported that Brooklyn had given Thomas a qualifying offer. But a source familiar with the guard’s thinking said he didn’t consider himself inferior to Immanuel Quickley, Tyler Herro or RJ Barrett “so he could want $30 million, too.”
Instead, he was offered roughly half of that. And now will play for a fifth of that.
The Nets offered Thomas a two-year, $30 million deal with a team option for the second year, or a one-year, $9.5 million pact with incentives up to $11 million while waiving the no-trade clause, according to ESPN. Thomas’ agents, Octagon’s Alex Saratsis and Ron Shade, rejected both.
Now Thomas will try to get more a year from now.
That’s no sure thing.
Thomas has vastly outperformed his draft slot — taken 27th by the Nets back in 2021 — in averaging a team-high 24.0 points last season on 44/34/88 splits. But he was a middling playmaker, porous defender and oft-injured, playing just 25 games due to repeated hamstring woes.
The 23-year-old has fans at the highest level in the Nets front office, but does not have a robust market around the NBA, according to numerous scouts and league executives who spoke with the Post.
No team has cap space to sign Thomas this summer. He can still be traded, but would have to approve any deal.
While Thomas is a preternaturally talented isolation scorer, the league is moving away from those sort of one-dimensional guards and leaning into quick-processing court-mappers. That was apparent in the NBA Finals, and was also clear in both the words and deeds of Brooklyn GM Sean Marks on draft night.
The Nets picked three point guards in the first round (Egor Demin, Nolan Traore, and Ben Saraf), as well as a fourth player who served as his team’s primary playmaker (Danny Wolf). They apparently have a new “type,” and it sounds like Thomas may not be it.
“Yeah, that goes hand-in-hand with IQ, and how they play the game,” Marks said of the style of play Brooklyn wants. “Very quick decisions. It’s 0.5-second basketball, you catch and make a decision. You don’t hold the ball.”
None of that sounds like Thomas, who is betting on himself — and not for the first time.
The guard sat out his sophomore year of high school due to disagreements with the coaching staff, opting to do individual training and just play AAU. He eventually transferred to Oak Hill and became the powerhouse’s all-time leading scorer.
When — to the surprise of no one — the Nets didn’t give Thomas a rookie extension last summer, he switched from Gersh’s Terrence Felder to Octagon.
Now in a messy situation, the Nets haven’t maximized an asset and Thomas has put himself at risk.
Brooklyn still has $22.4 million in cap space and are $6.9 million under the floor per ESPN Insider Bobby Marks, who is the Nets’ former assistant GM. But the minute Thomas took the QO, they lost leverage.
And for Thomas, the history of players who exercise the qualifying offer is that their next contract often ends up as disappointing. And on a Nets team that is tanking, how incentivized will they be to heavily feature him over the younger players they’re determined to develop?
“On a team that’s not trying to win and doesn’t care, if he signs the qualifying offer he runs the risk they don’t feature him after October,” a league source had told The Post before the move. “A team that isn’t trying to win, you’re stuck.”
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