National Basketball Association

Rookie Cam Thomas could give the Brooklyn Nets yet another elite scorer

Updated Aug. 18, 2021 5:25 p.m. ET

Barclays Center will be the home to a lot of buckets this coming NBA season — and it won't just be due to the fact that Kevin Durant, James Harden and Kyrie Irving are employed by the Brooklyn Nets.

Those three form the most offensively gifted three-headed monster in the NBA. But it's the combination of that trio and a rookie who somehow fell into Brooklyn's lap with the 27th overall pick in the 2021 NBA Draft that could be too much for opposing teams.

Introducing shooting guard Cam Thomas from LSU.

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The Nets might have struck gold with their first-round selection after Thomas surprisingly slid to the bottom of the first round after a dominant freshman season at LSU.

The 6-foot-4 guard led the SEC by averaging 23 points per game in his only season in college. He scored 25 or more points in 16 games and at least 16 points in 28 of 29 games, the lone exception coming in a game at Ole Miss on Jan. 9, when he played only four minutes due to an ankle injury.

His scoring prowess quickly translated to the NBA Summer League, in which Thomas topped the leaderboard with an average of 27 PPG in four games.

Really, it should come as no surprise that Thomas has been able to put the ball in the hoop against both college- and NBA-level competition. In fact, that has been his forte since high school.

Thomas is the all-time leading scorer in the history of Oak Hill Academy, the famed prep school in Virginia that has produced NBA players such as Durant, Carmelo Anthony, Rajon Rondo and Brandon Jennings, among others.

Thomas also led the Nike EYBL in scoring during the summer of 2019, with 29.5 PPG, the highest mark in the history of the top grassroots basketball league in the country.

Even with his impeccable high school résumé, Thomas was somehow left off the 2020 McDonald's All-American roster. Now it appears he has been overlooked again, considering that he almost fell out of the first round of the draft after a dominant freshman season in college.

But if history is any indicator, he will respond in the only way he knows how: scoring the basketball.

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