INGLEWOOD — The Milwaukee Bucks have waived guard Cam Thomas, the team announced Monday, marking the second time in less than two months that he has become a free agent.
Thomas averaged more than 20 points per game as recently as last season. He was let go by the Brooklyn Nets at the NBA trade deadline after the team could not find a trade partner for him, then the Bucks signed him to a contract for the rest of the season.
After getting accustomed to his new team in a 13-minute debut in Orlando on Feb. 11, Thomas burst onto the scene with a 34-point performance in his second game with the Bucks, a 116-108 win over the Magic on Feb. 13. That performance led Bucks coach Doc Rivers to compare his new guard favorably to past Sixth Man of the Year award winners Jamal Crawford and Lou Williams.
Thomas scored in double figures in each of the Bucks’ next three games before his scoring declined and Rivers started to use Thomas less. In the Bucks’ Mar. 14 contest in Atlanta, a 122-99 loss to the Hawks, Rivers played Thomas for three minutes in the second quarter and then chose against playing him again in the second half.
Rivers followed that up by not playing Thomas in each of the next two games and talked about how he is going to use the players that play the right way when asked about Thomas’ lack of playing time during that period.
Now, just over a month and a half after signing with the Bucks, Thomas’ tenure with Milwaukee is over.
“It’s just a tough one, honestly,” Rivers said. “We ran out of bodies. At the end of the day, there were guys we had to make a decision on, and I thought Cam was really good overall.
“And maybe someday, we’ll revisit, but where we’re at right now, not really in the hunt like when we signed him, we thought it was the right thing to do for the rest of the guys right now.”
When asked what went wrong for Thomas as time went on and why he fell out of favor with the coaching staff in Milwaukee, Rivers chose against going into detail on the decision.
“There are things that we don’t need to talk about,” Rivers said. “That’s not anybody’s business. Like I said before, that’s where as a coach, you have to make decisions on what’s the best thing for the team at that time.”
The timing of Thomas’ release means he is ineligible to participate in the postseason if another NBA team picks him up.
A high-scoring guard who has struggled in other aspects of the game, Thomas averaged 22.5 points per game with the Nets in 2023-24 and 24 points per game last season, albeit in just 25 appearances. Thomas was a restricted free agent last summer but signed a one-year qualifying offer with Brooklyn when he and the Nets could not agree on a long-term contract.
Milwaukee will use its newly available roster spot on forward Pete Nance, who was on a two-way contract but will now sign a standard NBA deal.
“He deserved it,” Rivers said. “Pete is one of those guys that can help any basketball team, not only on the floor, but in the locker room.
“He’s just a fabulous human being, great in our locker room, great role player, high IQ guy. He can be on a championship team, a rebuild team. He can be on anything, so you want him around.”
Before getting converted to an NBA contract by the Bucks, Nance had been available in 49 games this season, which meant he had just one more game left as a two-way player before the team was going to need to convert him to an NBA contract to continue playing him this season.
In 37 appearances across those 49 games, Nance has averaged 4.5 points and 2.2 rebounds in 12.1 minutes per game and shot 47.9 percent on 71 3-point attempts.
“It would mean everything,” Nance told reporters about the possibility of getting converted to a regular NBA contract after the Bucks’ shootaround on Monday. “I think that’s the dream. I think coming into this league, I was just an E-10 and played in the G-League a ton, and that (an NBA contract) is what I’d come to the gym every day thinking about and working for.
“So, being able to take that step would be amazing. But it would just make me hungry for even more and shows me what I want and what I can think of and dream of is possible, so just keep pushing more.”
Heading into Monday night’s game against the LA Clippers, Milwaukee (29-41) trailed the Charlotte Hornets by 7 1/2 games for the final play-in spot in the Eastern Conference, a serious disappointment for the Bucks, who have made the playoffs in each of the last nine seasons and won an NBA championship just five years ago. The Bucks have an offseason full of pivotal decisions in front of them as they try to convince Giannis Antetokounmpo to sign a supermax extension on Oct. 1 before the start of next season.