Nation’s on notice

SEATTLE — There was a time when Isaiah Thomas craved the spotlight, then a period when he could just as soon do without it.

These days, Thomas, a junior on the University of Washington men’s basketball team, just accepts it.

“They always talk about me — good or bad,” Thomas said Tuesday. “So it doesn’t bother me.”

This week, on the heels of his most productive game at UW, Thomas is only hearing good things. Not only has he emerged as one of the leading candidates for the Pacific-10 Conference player of the year, but he also has been re-discovered on the national stage.

Thomas’ 27-point, 13-assist performance in Sunday’s victory over Cal has the 5-foot-9 guard back on the national scene. Since taking over point guard duties for injured teammate Abdul Gaddy, Thomas is starting to get his due again.

“To me, everybody in college basketball should be talking about Isaiah Thomas,” said Arizona coach Sean Miller, whose Wildcats will be at Hec Edmundson Pavilion on Thursday night to face Thomas’ Huskies.

Miller is among the Pac-10 coaches who aren’t surprised by the numbers Thomas has been putting up as of late. Thomas leads the conference with 5.4 assists per game while averaging a team-high 16.5 points per outing. Yet the Arizona coach is somewhat baffled by the lack of attention UW’s leading scorer gets on the national scene.

“He deserves to be put in the category of the nation’s best point guards,” Miller said. “He hasn’t been getting one-tenth of the credit that he deserves in that category.”

UW coach Lorenzo Romar is impressed with Thomas but not overly surprised.

“What Isaiah’s been doing is really remarkable,” he said. “With his scoring, and now with him leading the league in assists, but you still don’t see the intangible of his leadership and his will to win. He does so many things beyond scoring, and now, assisting.”

Thomas has been handling the ball more than ever since Gaddy suffered a season-ending knee injury two weeks ago, and the diminutive guard has been thriving in the role. Thomas has averaged 20.0 points and 9.3 assists since Gaddy went down, including an incredible Sunday performance that saw him directly involved in 57 of the 92 points Washington scored against Cal.

On Tuesday, Romar called it the best performance he’s ever seen from a Husky guard.

Teammate Matthew Bryan-Amaning said Thomas is “just showing everybody else what we all knew he could do.”

While the praise might help stroke Thomas’ ego, it doesn’t seem likely to go to his head. Thomas always has been fueled by the so-called “haters,” to whom he seems to pay more attention to than those who praise his play.

“When you play basketball, and you’re 5-9, you’re (always) being told: ‘You can’t,’” Romar said. “He’s always been told ‘he can’t’ on the basketball court. So he just has this built-in chip on his shoulder.”

Thomas’ latest motivation was to prove that he could play point guard. Mostly viewed as a score-first guard — coming into this season, he averaged 16.2 points and just 2.9 assists per game — Thomas has shown a more generous game as a junior. He dished out 12 assists in UW’s exhibition win over St. Martin’s in early November and has continued to distribute to teammates throughout the regular season.

“I like getting the ball to Aziz (N’Diaye) and Matt (Bryan-Amaning) and our shooters on the wing,” Thomas said. “I’m just glad to keep a smile on their face. As long as we keep winning, I’m good.”

Last week, Thomas added to his generosity when he gave his first Pac-10 player-of-the-week award to Gaddy. In a sense, Thomas feels as if he’s playing this season for his teammate and fellow Tacoma native.

“I’m trying to be like Gaddy,” Thomas said. “I’m trying to be the best point guard I can be and keep guys smiling on this team.”

Thanks in part to Thomas’ emergence as a combination scorer/distributor, outsiders are starting to dish out the praise in his direction again.

“When I turn the TV on and they’re talking about the nation’s best guards, and for him really not to be mentioned is really not fair,” Arizona’s Miller said. “We have, like all teams that play Washington, our hands full in trying to deal with him because it’s not an easy task.”

Of note

Charges have still not been filed in the sexual-assault case against the unnamed UW athlete, but Romar continued to field questions about the subject Tuesday. He said the Huskies did not appear to be distracted by the ongoing investigation and was quick to shoot down further questions by saying he would not comment again until if or when charges have been filed. “I won’t run from it when it’s that time,” Romar said, “but at this time, there’s no need to address it.” … Romar shuffled his starting lineup for the Cal game, inserting Scott Suggs in place of Venoy Overton, but the coach has not yet decided who will start this week against Arizona and Arizona State. Romar said he liked Suggs’s size (6-6) against Cal but that he will evaluate matchups on a game-to-game basis. … Gaddy had what Romar called “successful” surgery on his torn anterior cruciate ligament, a procedure that involved doctors cutting open both knees. Romar said Gaddy would likely be back on the court in three to four months.