Which One of the Top Restricted Free Agents is Most Valuable?
There are four guys in particular who are talented but restricted and yet to sign. But why? We take a look and rank the waiting group by overall value.
We’re now a month into the 2025 free agency cycle and, for various reasons, the four most high-profile restricted free agents remain unsigned.
But of these four young players – Josh Giddey, Cam Thomas, Quentin Grimes and Jonathan Kuminga – who is the most important for their team to hold on to?
Who is the least?
Let’s break it down and rank them (with the help of DRIP, our projection of a player’s contribution to his team’s plus/minus per 100 possessions) in terms of how valuable they are as players (not just to their specific teams).
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Thomas has been spending the last few weeks feuding with NBA analyst Zach Lowe (and at a standstill in contract negotiations with the Brooklyn Nets).
Thomas is a black belt in the practice of getting buckets. Last season, he placed in the 99th percentile in scoring volume (29 points per 75 possessions). However, he doesn’t provide much outside of that.
He’s never averaged more than 3.8 assists despite playing over 30 minutes per game in two of his seasons. And his defense is among the worst in the association (he ranked 568th out of 569 players in defensive DRIP).
He also isn’t an efficient enough scorer to warrant building a system around him. His scoring efficiency (57.9% true shooting) was only in the 56th percentile, and that was a career best for him, too! Juxtapose this with NBA MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who averaged 33.8 points per 75 and was in the 91st percentile in true shooting.
Lowe drew Thomas’s attention by mentioning that this sort of player – scoring guards who aren’t talented enough to be a No. 1 option and offer little else – is becoming devalued by the market.
Just a month ago, the Utah Jazz attached a second-round pick to Collin Sexton and sent him to the Charlotte Hornets. That means he was viewed as a negative asset in the trade, and he just might be a more valuable player than Thomas.
Bottom line, if players of the same archetype as Thomas are being traded with picks, it tells us that his player type probably isn’t supremely valuable.
Kuminga isn’t too different from Thomas in that he is a supremely gifted scorer who struggles in the other facets of the game.
In the four playoff games against the Minnesota Timberwolves after Stephen Curry tweaked his hamstring, Kuminga averaged 24.3 points against the sixth-best defense in the league.
Where Kuminga differs from Thomas, and the reason he’s ranked ahead of him, is his size. Kuminga is nearly five inches taller and longer in terms of wingspan. Fortune favors the bold, and basketball favors the tall. While Kuminga isn’t a good defender right now, his ceiling as a defender is much higher than Thomas’s thanks to his physical tools.
Kuminga’s athleticism also makes him a more tantalizing scorer. Where Thomas typically lulls his defenders to sleep before launching inefficient long 2s, Kuminga uses his bionic frame to pulverize defenders on the way to the rim.
Kuminga may have a higher impact on winning than Thomas, but that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily a winning player (31st percentile in DRIP). Kuminga can put up big numbers when his star comrades are down for the count, but the Warriors were still a minus-7 per game when he was on the floor.
And when he’s surrounded by higher-level talent, he has a hard time fitting in (Kuminga was averaging just 6.3 points when Curry was healthy).
Giddey is the first player with more than one trick in his shtick. He’s a good scorer (67th percentile scoring volume), but he’s also a resplendent passer and playmaker (96th percentile assist rate) – capable of making pretty much any pass in the book.
Unlike Kuminga and Thomas, Giddey has had the chance to play for a team other than the one that drafted him, and Year 1 with the Chicago Bulls went much smoother than most people predicted (although we had some optimism).
In his final 25 games of the season, Giddey averaged 20.2 points, 9.5 rebounds and 8.1 assists on 61.5% true shooting. This stretch gives the Bulls hope that he can be a fulcrum in their next great team.
Giddey isn’t without his flaws, though (hence why he hasn’t been signed yet). He’s never been known to be a good defender, and his jumper is pretty shaky, which makes it hard for him to play off the ball. However, he did hit 37.8% of his threes last season, offering some hope of improvement in this area.
Like Thomas and Kuminga, Giddey isn’t good enough to be a top option and he struggles in the areas that complementary players are supposed to excel in, giving him more of a floor-raising profile than a ceiling-raising one.
RFA DRIP Leaders
RFA DRIP Leaders
Grimes has the lowest career scoring average of this group, so he can’t keep a bad team afloat the way his counterparts can, but the goal isn’t to be middle of the road. The goal is to be the best of the best, and Grimes has all the tools to take a good team and make it great.
Grimes is a good shooter (38.5% from 3), a closeout attacker (84th percentile true shooting on drives, per NBA.com), and a perimeter defender (61st percentile or higher in steal rate in three of four seasons). Grimes is the ideal 3-and-D wing to surround star players with, and last season, he showed us that he can do a little bit more off-the-dribble when duty calls.
It’s likely the only reason Grimes hasn’t agreed to an extension with the Philadelphia 76ers is that he went on a bonkers heater to close out the season (he averaged 26.6 points in March). It could be causing his camp to try and squeeze a few more pennies out of the deal.
Regardless, Grimes is the member in this group with the fewest weaknesses, which is exactly what you want from this caliber of player.