When veteran talent scout Eric Bossi first got word there was a promising basketball player in Maine by the name of Cooper Flagg, his reaction was entirely rational: “I don’t go watch kids in middle school.”
Yes, Flagg only was in eighth grade when his talent began to appear inevitable.
For 25 years, Bossi has been on the road evaluating top young talent in the sport, currently as national basketball director for 247 Sports. For every LeBron James, there have been many more young men overhyped by overzealous parents or summer coaches through highlight tapes or YouTube videos. There’s good reason to wait.
“His freshman year, I got a couple of full game films, and I was like: Wow, this dude is going to be legit,” Bossi told The Sporting News. “But that spring, when he was playing in the EYBL with Maine United is when we all got to see him up close and personal. He came right out of the box blocking everything in sight, dunking everything in sight, making shots.”
Monday night, Flagg will make his Division I debut for the Duke Blue Devils against the Maine Black Bears, the team that represents his home state, where his fraternal twin Ace will begin his college career in 2025. There is a symmetry in this, but it will not present the sort of competitive test that allows the public immediately to gauge what might be possible as Cooper’s career develops.
There will be plenty of opportunity, though, for basketball fans to see what those who’ve covered or evaluated or coached him witnessed as Flagg, now a 6-9, 205-pound small forward with a 40-inch vertical leap, rapidly ascended from those days as a middle-school terror. By the time the season’s first month has passed, Duke will have played Kentucky, Arizona, Kansas and Auburn, only the last of those at Cameron Indoor Stadium.
Those who follow college basketball are about to get a healthy dose of Cooper Flagg. His commercial possibilities already have been recognized in the NIL era with a Gatorade endorsement deal, joining such college athletes as Shadeur Sanders, JuJu Watkins and Paige Bueckers.
This is not the only way things will be different from when Zion Williamson rampaged through the 2018-19 season wearing the same uniform; Flagg’s excellence is not as audacious, and it’s hard for anyone to convey the same level of charisma. Flagg is for those who appreciate the game’s subtleties as well as the spectacle.
Fans will see someone about whom draft analyst and historian Matthew Maurer said “he plays with bravado”, USA Basketball’s Sharman White said “he affects winning” and Bossi said, “I get all the excitement.” They will see a young man who is only beginning his college career but already spent time in the Olympic training camp scrimmaging – successfully, by all accounts – against Jayson Tatum, Anthony Edwards, Devin Booker and the other members of the gold-medal winning United States team.
They will see a player I described upon his commitment to the Blue Devils as the best American prospect in a decade. They will see the player almost universally projected to be the No. 1 pick in the 2025 NBA Draft.
And Flagg still is only 17 years old.
There is plenty of available video evidence regarding what he might become as a basketball player. There are highlights of the Olympic practices. There is a full game from the summer of 2023, when Flagg’s team opposed one led by the Boozer brothers, Cameron and Cayden, for the Nike EYBL Peach Jam title in the U16 classification. And there’s another from the previous summer, when Flagg led the United States to the FIBA U17 World Cup title with a subtly magnificent performance against Spain.
White, the coach of that team, first saw Flagg in a USA Basketball development camp in New Orleans during the 2022 Final Four. The previous summer, he’d been in charge of qualifying the USA Basketball junior national team for the world tournament with a team that included Liam McNeeley (now at UConn), Justin McBride (Oklahoma State) and Jerod McCain (Philadelphia 76ers). At 15, Flagg was grouped with the Boozers and forward Koa Peat and sent into scrimmages against that “veteran” squad.
“That young group, they just really turned the camp upside down,” White told The Sporting News. “They were playing against the older kids, and they were destroying them. And he was at the forefront of it. It was amazing to see how he – for a first-timer at a USA Basketball mini-camp – how he conducted and handled himself on the court was great to witness.”
Flagg made the team for the 2022 U17 World Cup. He did not start. He ranked sixth on the team in scoring. He shot 42 percent from the field. And by the end of the tournament, with the U.S. winning every game by a double-digit margin, he had firmly established himself as the United States team’s best player.
White also coached Flagg in the McDonald’s All-American Game and the Nike Hoop Summit this past spring and watched his young star lead comeback victories in both competitions.
“Some people think that when you score a lot of points, that’s how you affect winning the most. I believe it’s actually the opposite,” said White, who works as coach and associate athletic director at Pace Academy in Atlanta. “I think when you do more things besides scoring, that’s when you really contribute to winning. That’s what he did. He could score, but he also rebounded. He defended at a very high level. He was a communicator. He was a great teammate. He just engulfed the game and made it his own.
“He was our sixth man, and when he got in the game, it just took on a whole new face. If we already had energy, we picked up more energy. And if we were not at a high-energy level, he brought it. In the gold medal game, he made so many winning plays. On one possession, he blocked the kid who was the eventual MVP of the tournament – he blocked his shot four times on one possession. It was a signature moment, not only for him but for our team.”
Of all the positions on the floor – and there is a distinct quality to them at this stage of development, no matter how much preaching is done about “positionless” basketball – the transition from high school to college is trickier for the big wing player than anyone else.
A point guard or center will find the competition to be more severe at the D-I level, but the job remains similar. A standard-sized shooting guard still has the responsibility to get open at make deep jumpers. The NBA-sized small forward, though, faces far more similarly sized opponents than on the way through high school. Overpowering those opponents is not as easy or as common; it’s no coincidence it took Justin Edwards until the final months of his freshman season at Kentucky to be effective, or Caleb Houstan in 2021-22 at Michigan.
Carmelo Anthony, who led Syracuse to the 2003 NCAA title, was one of the few who managed the transition with tremendous individual and team success. He excelled because of his exceptional versatility; upon seeing his college opener at Madison Square Garden, I wrote that Anthony “could be first-team All-Big East at any position”.
What will separate Flagg, as well, is the variety of ways in which he can impact a game. At the U17 Worlds, he averaged 10 rebounds, 2.9 blocks, 2.4 steals and 1.9 assists. Most who have scouted him cite long-distance shooting as an area for improvement, but he did make 38 percent of his attempts in his final year at Montverde Academy, which plays a national schedule of elite prep school competition.
In describing that flexibility, Bossi cited the words of Brian Snow, who previously worked at 247 Sports and now is director of recruiting for Notre Dame. “We used to always be debating positions, and he’d say to me, ‘His position is on the floor, Coach, figure it out.’ Cooper Flagg is a guy whose position is on the floor.”
It’s been more than 30 years since I first encountered a young Kevin Garnett at the Nike All-American Camp at the RCA Dome in Indianapolis, his ferocity filling that vast space with every trip downcourt. When those who’ve seen him discuss Flagg’s competitive edge, that is the sort of picture they compose.
“I like that in players. I like guys that are there to put on a show, and they’re going to let you know they’re going to put on a show,” said Mauer, who has published The Draft Review for more than 20 years. “I’ve seen a lot of lazy player comps; I’ve seen people trying to do every former white prospect ever. To me, he’s like a hybrid. I don’t think we’ve had anybody like Cooper, but he’s like a hybrid of Brandon Ingram and Kevin Garnett.
“Because he’s not as athletic as Kevin Garnett, but he plays with the same level of passion and competition level. He’s not as skilled as Brandon Ingram, but those skills are starting to develop more and more. It’s all there. This is one of the prospects I’m really excited to see at this level.”
It helps fuel the excitement that Flagg has chosen to play his one college season at Duke. Not that it had to be the Blue Devils; it would be similar if he’d enrolled at UConn to help the Huskies chase a third consecutive NCAA title, or Alabama or Xavier.
When Anthony Edwards joined an undermanned Georgia squad in the fall of 2019, his college career essentially lasted a single day. His 31-point second half against Michigan State in the Maui Invitational represented the most thrilling performance any collegian delivered in the past five years, but his Bulldogs lost that game and another 15. Their .500 record wouldn’t have gotten them into March Madness even if there’d been a tournament that year.
It elevates the college game for the best prospects to be surrounded by teammates capable of helping to win games. With the Blue Devils, Flagg will be accompanied by five-star freshmen wings Kon Knueppel and Isaiah Evans and center Khaman Maluach, a 7-foot center who can provide the rim protection last year’s Devils lacked. There are three products of the transfer portal (Sion James from Tulane, Maliq Brown from Syracuse and Mason Gillis from Purdue) and veteran guards Caleb Foster and Tyrese Proctor.
“We had a couple spots where the No. 1 prospects were going into colleges that maybe didn’t have the supporting cast: Ben Simmons at LSU, Markelle Fultz at Washington,” Mauer said. “I do think it’s important – and people may hate this – for the bluebloods to have these kinds of guys. Because it reminds us of all that we love about college basketball.
“I think it’s brilliant when these guys can go to these blue-chip star teams and not only shine during the regular season, but the most important season of all in college basketball is the tournament. That’s where it all comes together and where Joe Sixpack says, ‘Who is this Cooper Flagg?’ ”
Flagg arrives when the impact of the American player at the game’s highest levels has been, at the least, diminished. The past six MVPs in the NBA have not been U.S.-born, and only the Sixers’ Joel Embiid was trained here. Of all the college products who’ve won the award, only Embiid finished his NCAA career after 2010.
When Hall of Fame Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski reinvigorated the nation’s Olympic basketball program in 2008, six players were under 25 years old. There were only two with this year’s gold medalists.
Does basketball need Cooper Flagg, or someone like him?
It won’t hurt, that’s for sure, except for teams or fans hoping to defeat the Devils.
“He has a winning DNA,” White said. “It has to mean something, moving forward, in his career.”
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