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All of a sudden, the Nets’ top scorer couldn’t score.
Cam Thomas was in a shooting funk for the first time in his professional career. Heck, it might have been the first extended slump of his life.
“Oh, yeah, it’s a first, but I think people forget I’m human,” Thomas, who recently turned 22 years old, said this week. “I’m still in my third year. I’m going to have ups and downs. … I’m going to have some bad games like [these]. But the thing about me, [I] stay confident. I’m going to keep taking the same shots that I’ve taken [against Houston], against New Orleans. Made them all year, every year I’ve been playing here since y’all have seen.
“So it’s not affecting me, [not] getting down on myself. I just want to keep playing, stay confident and keep playing within the flow of the offense. Everything will turn around for sure.”
The gifted young guard went into Friday’s game at Barclays Center against the Thunder having missed 20 consecutive shots over the prior three games.
Thomas hadn’t made a basket since a 4-foot floater with 1:37 left in last weekend’s loss to the same Thunder team. He missed his last two attempts in OKC.
Then came a scoreless 0-for-11 showing Tuesday at New Orleans.
Finally, Thomas struggled through a four-point, 0-for-7 performance Wednesday night at Houston in the tail end of the Nets’ back-to-back.
During the Nets’ five-game losing skid, Thomas averaged just 9.4 points on 28.3 percent shooting and a combined 3-of-17 from 3-point range.
But Thomas quickly snapped his streak of missed shots Friday night when he converted a layup off a scramble play in the first quarter. He knocked down a 17-foot jumper and a tough turnaround on his next two attempts.
Thomas went on to finish with 19 points on 6-of-14 shooting as the Nets returned to the win column with an upset of the Thunder.
“Cam Thomas, he’s young — he’s figuring it out on the fly,” Nic Claxton said after Thomas’ bounce-back performance. “Defenses are guarding him differently. They’re starting to pay a lot more attention to him. … He makes the game a lot easier for everybody, and he’s picking his spots better. It’s good to see Cam rolling and knocking his shots down.”
By and large, Thomas’ shot diet had not been the problem. He was taking similar looks to the ones he had made earlier in the season.
“I’m just missing them,” Thomas said this week. “Honestly it’s nothing [opponents] are doing. Honestly, I’m just missing. I’m getting everything I want, getting to the paint, missing layups. Missed the midrange I always make, missed a lot of looks from 3, step-back 3 that I always take.”
The Nets needed to get Thomas right. And they said it was more a case of them failing him than him failing them.
“Well, if you watched [the New Orleans] game, we put him in some bad positions,” Cam Johnson said. “I mean grenade after grenade, late clock shot after late clock shot. That’s a tough position to be in. And when you have your first five, six shots of the game coming from those, you can’t [get in a rhythm].
“…I’m not going to put anything on him. We put him in bad positions. And he’s a talented scorer, so I told him during the game, ‘Just keep your head up, man. This is tough. But it’s a collective thing.’ His 0-for-11, it should go to the team in a sense, where he just had the ball with three seconds left and had to force up a shot.
“So, a lot of that comes back to how we move the ball and how we put ourselves in position, how we put pressure on the rim and then generate kick-out opportunities and easier shots, so it’s not always that tough shot that we have to put up.”
That in many ways summed up the Nets’ broken offense.
Thomas is arguably the best tough-shot maker on the roster, but the Nets being out of sync has led to an higher-than-normal diet of difficult looks and late-clock isolations.
“It’s a testament that we know he can score one-on-one, and so some of those grenades that he gets, he’s bailed us out many times before — so that’s a compliment,” Nets head coach Jacque Vaughn said earlier in the week before the Thunder win. “But no player wants all those throughout the course of the game. I think CT is trying to make the right play. And the first half [in Houston] he might’ve had four assists. He’s trying to make the right play.
“Our entire group, we’re just not in a groove right now, and he’s just a part of it. And it helps when your other teammates are making shots also. … So I have complete confidence that he’ll find his groove. He’s too good not to.”
Thomas, the Nets’ leading scorer with 20.7 points per game (Mikal Bridges has 20.6), ranks 41st in the NBA in scoring, and is younger than every player ahead of him other than 21-year-olds Paolo Banchero and Alperen Şengün.
But he’s a defensively challenged off-guard who is not much of a creator, one reason why league front office personnel have such differing opinions on his value. Some decry his defense. Others praise his ability to get to his spots and to the free-throw line.
Vaughn is right in the notion of Thomas trying to do the right thing.
Yes, fired coach Steve Nash challenged Thomas to improve his playmaking. TV cameras caught Claxton earlier this season yelling at Thomas to pass the ball. Just two players ahead of Thomas on the scoring chart (Lauri Markkanen, Jaren Jackson Jr.) average fewer than his 2.2 assists per game.
But Thomas is trying to change that. He matched his career high of five assists twice in the past 10 games (he had zero in 24 minutes on Friday night).
The Nets picked up Thomas’ $4 million option for next season, but there are still decisions to be made on whether to extend him or risk restricted free agency.
And thrown into this mix was Thomas’ career-worst slump. Right now, the Nets are not built to win if Thomas is missing.
In Vaughn’s perfect world, Ben Simmons’ pace would create open 3-point looks and his defense would cover some of Thomas’ and Spencer Dinwiddie’s shortcomings on that end.
Thomas is at his best when paired with a defender such as Simmons (or backup Dennis Smith Jr.), but with Simmons having played just six games — and still sidelined due to a bad back — those plans are moot.
The Nets have been outscored by 8.6 points per 100 possessions with Thomas on the floor.
Vaughn pulled Thomas from the starting lineup Dec. 29, replacing him with the forward Dorian Finney-Smith to get more defense and size on the floor. Friday’s return of Lonnie Walker IV — who hadn’t played since Nov. 30 — also could provide offensive punch off the bench and eat into Thomas’ playing time.
To his credit, Thomas has said all the right things in the aftermath of the benching about excelling in the role that he’s in.
Some fans have opined that the move caused Thomas’ slump by denting his confidence. Chances are those fans never have met him.
“He’s an extremely talented scorer, and we know what he’s capable of doing when he’s knocking down those shots, so we’ve just got to keep him steady,” Claxton said. “Of course he’s going to stay confident in himself. Cam’s not the type of player to lose confidence in himself.”
Thomas said he works too hard for the slump to continue for long.
“I just know the time I put in, the work I put in,” Thomas said. “I’m trying to get people involved a little more often. But for us as a team…we’ve just got to stick to our principles that we learned in training camp, stick to our identity as a team that we have and just keep playing no matter what. No matter who’s making shots, missing shots, we just stick to our identity as a team. So I’m just going to keep it up.”