Brooklyn Nets guard Cam Thomas is heading into the 2025-26 NBA season after accepting his one-year, $6 million qualifying offer (QO) to return to the Nets after contract negotiations did not go his way. Brooklyn appeared to play hardball with Thomas when it came to the negotiations and with Thomas taking his QO, he is considered to be one of the free-agents that lost during this offseason.
“Thomas is back in Brooklyn after accepting his $6 million qualifying offer, a wildly disappointing result for a player who once expected to earn $30-40 million per season, sources told NetsDaily’s Lucas Kaplan,” Grant Hughes wrote for Bleacher Report. Hughes went on to note that the only restricted free-agent that seemed to come away with a positive outcome was Chicago Bulls guard Josh Giddey.
“That discrepancy could be viewed as the league getting wise to the actual value of empty scoring, but only if Thomas were the only RFA struggling to get his bag,” Hughes continued. “Brooklyn, Golden State and Philadelphia all had no issue daring their RFAs to find offers on a barren market, knowing they’d come back empty-handed,” Hughes said later in his explanation.
Thomas, 23, is coming off a 2024-25 season in which he averaged 24.0 points, 3.3 rebounds, and 3.8 assists per game while shooting 43.8% from the field and 34.9% from three-point land. Coming off the best season of his career, despite it happening in just 25 games, Thomas was understandably looking for a significant raise during his first foray into free-agency.
After seeing how negotiations went between Thomas and the Nets over the first few months of free-agency, it seemed apparent that he wasn’t going to get the deal he was looking for from any team for a variety of reasons. Ultimately, Thomas chose to take his qualifying offer so that he could either choose where he gets traded to later in the season or guarantees himself unrestricted free-agency next summer. Either way, Thomas did not get his way this offseason.
This article originally appeared on Nets Wire: Nets’ Cam Thomas listed among FAs that didn’t benefit from this summer
