Isaiah Thomas: From final draft pick to NBA stardom
Isaiah Thomas isn’t much for subtlety.
So when the Boston Celtics guard returned to his roots recently, dedicating a Boys & Girls Club court to those kids from his hometown of Tacoma, Wash. who aren’t much smaller than him, no one should have been surprised when they saw the choice of wallpaper.
“Pick Me Last Again,” it reads in big, black lettering that surrounds the new “Isaiah Thomas Court.”
For the 5-foot-9 point guard whose Celtics are second in the Eastern Conference (36-19), and who will make his second All-Star appearance in New Orleans this weekend, it has been quite the journey since he was coming up. From Tacoma to the University of Washington to his ‘No. 60’ status in the 2011 NBA draft to the outer edges of the MVP discussion, his is the NBA’s ultimate underdog tale.
No wonder he started crying when he thought back on it.
“My mom said I was going to cry before I went up there, and I told her, ‘I’m not going to cry,’” Thomas, who won the NBA Cares Community Assist Award for December, told USA TODAY Sports this week. “But when I’d seen her start crying a little bit, I couldn’t hold it back. It was just all the emotion that’s been built up since I was a little boy, always having to fight my own battles and just continue to keep going with all the doubt and all, I guess, the hate, and everything ... It was one of the best days of my life.”
Players this short aren’t supposed to stand this tall.
Yet here is Thomas, son of a mother who is a tireless nurse and a father who has spent nearly three decades as a parts inspector for Boeing, ranked second among all NBA players in scoring (29.8 points per game) and well on his way toward fulfilling a legacy that Celtics general manager Danny Ainge dared him to dream about upon arrival.
Headed to Boston
It was Feb. 19, 2015 when everything changed: Thomas to Boston in exchange for Marcus Thornton and the Cleveland Cavaliers’ 2016 first-round pick.
The Sacramento Kings team that drafted him with the final pick had let him leave in free agency in that summer before.
“They just kept trying to push me out, which they did, and I’m fine with it now,” he says.
He wanted to play for the Lakers, having adopted his father’s fandom while finding inspiration in Kobe Bryant’s legendary work ethic, but L.A. opted for Jeremy Lin instead. The Kings, clearly unconvinced that Thomas was a good fit alongside DeMarcus Cousins, went with Darren Collison.
Enter the Phoenix Suns, who gave him a four-year, $27 million deal and had ill-fated visions of a point guard platoon approach with Eric Bledsoe, Goran Dragic and Thomas sharing time.
“It sounded good … like it was going to be all about competition, and may the best man win,” he remembers. “And then when I got there, it wasn’t that.”
GALLERY: ISAIAH THOMAS THROUGH THE YEARS
Minutes before the 2015 trade deadline – and not long after Dragic had been dealt to Miami – Thomas was sent to Boston. Ainge, he of the two championship rings that made him a local authority on all things Celtics, would set a very different tone.
“I sat down with Danny Ainge, and he was talking about how much of a fan he’s been of mine since the draft,” said Thomas, who is shooting 46.8% overall, 38.2% from three-point range and on pace to tie his career-high in assists (6.3 per game). “And when he told me I could be a Celtics legend by the way I played … I’m thinking, ‘OK, now he’s just excited about the trade. He’s just saying stuff to make me happy, and make me feel comfortable.’ But he really felt like that.
“And then when I first sat down with (Celtics coach) Brad (Stevens), one of the first things Brad said was, ‘Don’t adjust to this team. Make this team adjust to you. We need a player like you, and we want you to be the best Isaiah Thomas you can be.’”
When it comes to NBA stardom, a player’s confidence isn’t enough to spark a rise – even when it’s someone like Thomas who doesn’t traffic in self-doubt. A player needs to be empowered, to be put in a position for his talents to be maximized and his weaknesses to be masked.
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity,” the Roman philosopher, Seneca, once said.
But what if the right opportunity doesn’t come?
“I had those visions of being an All-Star,” said Thomas, who will be a free agent again in the summer of 2018 if he doesn’t sign an extension with the Celtics this summer. “I had those visions of being in MVP conversations and leading a team to the playoffs and being that guy … But where do I start? With everything against me, with all the politics, with me not getting an opportunity that I want to have from the jump, where do I start and how do I achieve those goals?”
And therein lies the genius of the Celtics’ approach.
“(With) everybody who comes through, we’re not looking at what people say they can’t do, we’re looking at what they can,” Stevens said. “They’re in the NBA for a reason. You soar with their strengths, and then you go from there.
“(Thomas) brought something to the table that we didn’t have with our team, with his ability to get inside the paint with the ball, play the pick and roll. And then once we got more time together … you realize that he can do a lot of stuff as a two (shooting guard) – off of the ball, even though he’s small and has that kind of size. He just has so many things that he does well, and we choose to focus on that.”
The good? Not only is he on pace to post the second-best scoring season in Celtics history behind Larry Bird in 1987-88 (29.9 points per game), Thomas has earned his reputation as the king of the fourth quarter. His current mark (10.6 points per fourth) is the best on record since the league started keeping fourth-quarter data in 1996, and he’s lapping the field in terms of 20-plus point fourth quarters (he has four – including 29 in a career-high, victorious 52-point outing against Miami on Dec. 30 – while no other players have more than one).
Even peak Kobe (9.5 per in 2005-06), the Oklahoma City Thunder’s triple-double machine, Russell Westbrook (9.4 per this season), and LeBron James (9.1 per in 2007-08 while with Cleveland) didn’t score at this rate late in games. It’s even more impressive considering Thomas has been more efficient in the fourth (49.2% overall and 41.3% from beyond the arc).
The bad? His defense, as he is well aware, is much-maligned.
“Now that my offense is at such a high level, it’s like, ‘Well now his defense - he can’t guard anybody,’” said Thomas, who is last in the league in defensive real-plus minus (minus 4.38) for a Celtics team that ranks 19th in defensive rating (106.2 points allowed per 100 possessions). “And that’s never been the case. Like, nobody has ever picked on me or just ran every play towards me because I can’t stop anybody. It is what it is.
“They always gotta say something. I always say, if they’re still talking about LeBron and Kobe Bryant and those types of guys, and saying what they can’t do, then they’re definitely going to say what I can’t do.”
Stevens, true to his confidence-building ways, has a word of caution for Thomas’ critics.
“Obviously there’s always going to be matchups that you’re going to have to try to avoid (with Thomas),” Stevens said. “But every time that he hears people say that, then that makes that chip on his shoulder grow. He hears all the stuff about him not defending, and the bottom line is (that) he does a great job getting over screens, he does a great job trailing screens, he guards twos and ones. We put a lot of onus on him to (play) both sides.”
No ceilings
When it comes to people like Thomas, who learned long ago that selling himself short (no pun intended) was the quickest way to welcome failure, there’s really no such thing as a ceiling.
Playing in college was the first step, and he did that with aplomb for three seasons with the Huskies (“Cold…blooded!” announcer Gus Johnson hollered when Thomas’ game-winner gave Washington the Pac-10 title in 2011. Getting to the pros was Phase Two.
Six years later, his production in the pros (18.7 points, 5.2 assists per game) has been enough to change the conversation that surrounds him. This is no longer about where Thomas ranks in the league’s history of tiny guards, if only because he’s well on his way to surpassing the Calvin Murphys, Michael Adams, Terrell Brandons, Damon Stoudamires, Earl Boykins, Muggsy Bogues, Spud Webbs and Slater Martins of this world.
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So as Thomas ponders the question of where this is going, of the coming hurdles and how many of them he’ll be able to clear, the same fearlessness that he uses to enthrall the masses on the court can be found in his answer.
“I want to be the best player to ever play now; and that’s just what I want,” he says so boldly. “Maybe I won’t get there, but I put those goals in front of me so I can chase those.
“All the best players, all the great players, have that confidence in themselves to where they see visions that nobody else sees at some point. And then, boom, it just happens.”
Go ahead, in other words, pick him last again.
Follow Sam Amick on Twitter @Sam_Amick