The soap opera that is the career of Chris Thomas continued on Tuesday as Marshall announced that the former five-star recruit had been dismissed from the program.
The Charleston Daily Mail is reporting that the cause was -- shockingly -- a violation of team rules.
Thomas, a 6-foot-5 shooting guard, averaged 12.7 points as a sophomore last season. New Thundering Herd head coach Dan D’antoni will now be without two of their three leading scorers from last season, as Kareem Canty transferred out of the program. They also lost Elijah Pittman, who was averaging 21.7 points when he was suspended from the team after nine games last season.
Thomas came to Marshall from Chipola Junior College in Florida, but the path that he took to get there was winding. A native of Denver, Thomas bounced between prep schools, making stops at Princeton Day Academy (MD), Westwind Prep (AZ) and South Kent (CT) before eventually enrolling at Chipola Junior College in January of 2012. Originally a member of the Class of 2013, when he was ranked in the top ten nationally early on in his prep career, Thomas went there to earn his GED, sitting out a semester before becoming a member of the team for the 2012-2013 season.
Thomas committed to Xavier in April of 2012 but reneged on that commitment that September. He was supposed to enroll at Manhattan for the 2013-2014 season, but that went out the window when he violated a conditional release stemming from an arrest for driving an unregistered vehicle without a driver’s license by testing positive for marijuana. He actually was forced to miss Chipola’s 2013 postseason run because he was in jail.
Who knows where he will end up next, but Thomas has done a pretty solid job of wasting what should have been a productive basketball career.
