In honor of Isaiah Thomas’s triumphant return to the NBA, this is one of my favorite excerpts from our book, Hoops Heist: Seattle, the Sonics, and How A Stolen Team’s Legacy Gave Rise to the NBA’s Secret Empire. Let me tell you about the night IT dropped a legendary, state record 51 POINTS in a high school playoff game. You’ll enjoy this:
By the end of his sophomore year, he was the go-to guy on the Vikings offense in crunch time and the focal point of the opposing team’s defense.
By his junior year, he was averaging over 30 points per game, with regular outbursts of 40 or more in front of packed gyms. He was, in a word, electric.
“The bigger the game, the better he played,” his coach at Curtis, Lindsay Bemis, said. “He just had that confidence. But a lot of people didn’t call it
confidence when he was sixteen.”
Cockiness. Brashness. Boldness. Tenacity.
Whatever you want to call it, Thomas exuded it, and when the 2006 Washington State Tournament rolled around, he summoned all of his powers and put on a record-breaking show in the state semi-final against Franklin.
The performance is so revered and so much a part of Seattle basketball lore that on its ten-year anniversary in 2016, Jayson Jenks of the Seattle Times compiled an oral history of the game that included several memorable quotes.
“Before the game, they [Franklin] were just talking. Everybody was talking. But once I got going, it was like Michael Jordan stuff that no matter what they did, they weren’t going to stop me that night,” Thomas said. “Those were all guys I had played against from the AAU days, so we already had a little battle. I was talking stuff to the bench, to the players on the court, to the coaches. That was me. I learned that from Gary Payton. But they definitely got the last laugh.”
“The first play of the game, he came down and shot a three like he was Steph Curry, and once he did that, it was like, ‘Oh, man, this is going to be a tough game,’” Daniel Vasquez, a Franklin player, recalled.
After draining the initial three-pointer, Thomas made back-to-back threes, each from farther away than the first, and it brought to mind a classic scene from Jordan’s video Come Fly With Me, in which he talks about what it’s like to be in the zone and describes it as, “the hoop looks like a big old bucket.”
For Thomas, the hoop seemed larger than a bucket; it was more like a full-sized above-ground pool, and he couldn’t miss. By halftime he had scored 32 points.
The entire Franklin team had thirty-three.
“We re-inserted a game plan that we had used against Brandon Roy his senior year, which was: We’re going to let him be alone, but when he puts it down, we’re going to come at him,” Franklin Coach Jason Kerr said. “That, and we told our guys they had to stay mentally in the game even when shots went down. Much of the prep was on how we were going to try to take the ball out of his hands and make somebody else beat us. We did not anticipate that we were going to send two—and then in the second half send three—defenders at him. And he’d
still pull up and bang a shot in our face.”
Thomas hit shot after shot after shot on his way to a state record 51 points.
And this wasn’t one of those performances where a guy chucks it fifty times in a high school game to hang a fifty burger. No.
Thomas was an efficient 16-for-30 from the floor, including 8-for-16 from three and 11 free throws
on 17 attempts. (Thomas is still bothered by the missed free throws to this day, knowing he should have had 55 or 56 points.)
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