The scene felt funereal. In April, minutes after Duke’s collapse in the NCAA semifinal against Houston, a contingent of Blue Devils motored down a back hall of the Alamodome on a golf cart. Coach Jon Scheyer, flanked by freshman wing Kon Knueppel, was stuffed in the middle row. As the cart hummed down the quiet hallway, Cooper Flagg appeared on the back, still in his sweat-soaked uniform, staring vacantly in the direction he came. The images, captured by dozens of camera phones, quickly went viral. Flagg can’t recall what he was thinking in that moment. Just that, whatever it was, he didn’t want anyone to know it. “It was an incredible season,” Flagg later told reporters. “Didn’t end the way we wanted to.”
Weeks later Flagg still struggles to explain why. Up six points with 35 seconds left, Duke appeared to have a spot in the national title game locked up. Then a Houston three-pointer sliced the lead in half. A blown inbounds pass led to a dunk that cut it to one. On the next possession, Flagg was whistled for going over the back after the Blue Devils’ Tyrese Proctor missed the front end of a one-and-one. Two free throws at the other end gave the Cougars a one-point lead. With 15 seconds left, Duke put the ball in the hands of Flagg. He drove baseline, spun to the middle, pulled up from nine feet … and missed off the front of the rim. No shot at a national title. No regrets, it should be noted, either. “There’s certain things that I replay from that game,” Scheyer says. “That’s not one of them. You trust the ball in Cooper’s hands.”
With good reason. Flagg’s freshman season was an unqualified success. He averaged 19.2 points per game on 48.1% shooting, including 38.5% from three. He was a first-team All-American and the Naismith National Player of the Year. There were standout moments. A 42-point outburst against Notre Dame. A 20-point, 12-rebound effort against Louisville, one of his seven double-doubles. Against Houston, Flagg finished with 27 points, seven rebounds and four assists.
And the shot? “Got to a solid spot,” Flagg says with a shrug. That’s about as deep as he’s willing go. He says he has not rewatched the ending: “That’s just not who I am.” Nor has he tortured himself by what if-ing the final possession of his college career. “I’m not going to beat myself up over whether I could have taken one more dribble or whether I could have done something different,” Flagg says. “It was a tough shot, but I don’t think you’re going to get an easy shot in that opportunity. If you look at any game-winner at any level, I don’t think there’s a lot of wide-open [ones]. You get to a spot, you raise up, and you trust the work that you put in over time. I’m just going to live with what I trusted.”
What did trouble Flagg, those who know him say, was the belief that he let his teammates down. “He takes responsibility for probably too much at times,” says Matt MacKenzie, Flagg’s longtime trainer. “He was in rough shape for a couple of days.”
MacKenzie played college ball at Husson, a Division III school in Bangor, Maine. After graduating, he got into coaching, eventually focusing on player development. Around 2019, his phone rang. It was Kelly Flagg. She had a pair of 12-year-old twin boys, Cooper and Ace. And she wanted MacKenzie to work with them.
“I’m not going to beat myself up over whether I could have taken one more dribble or whether I could have done something different ... You get to a spot, you raise up, and you trust the work that you put in over time. I’m just going to live with what I trusted.”Cooper Flagg
Cooper’s legend had already been established. Andy Bedard was coaching youth basketball in southern Maine when he began hearing stories about a long-limbed third-grader up north dominating boys several years ahead of him. When he watched him play, Bedard was stunned by what he saw. Not in the game. In the layup line. “Some kids that age, they can’t walk and chew gum,” Bedard says. “Cooper’s doing left-handed flip layups, 45-degree angles. He was so coordinated.” When play started, Bedard was struck by Flagg’s feel for the game. “The way that he was passing the ball to bad players with extra backspin, nice and soft so they could finish,” Bedard says. “And if a teammate missed, he’d grab the rebound and let them shoot it again. He could dominate. He did dominate. But he played the right way.”
By the time Kelly called him, MacKenzie had already heard whispers about the supersized elementary schoolers tearing up the New England basketball circuit. Ace was solid, built like his brother, with a more conventional big man game. Cooper, though, was different. The physical tools were impressive. But it was his mind that stood out. Show Cooper something once, says MacKenzie, “and you didn’t have to show him again.”
MacKenzie ran him through drills with older kids. Situational stuff. Short shot clock. Pick-and-rolls requiring a quick decision. “His ability to process was oftentimes better than those guys,” MacKenzie says. “And they were playing college basketball.” He was like Will Hunting, with hops. That Duke put the ball in Flagg’s hands in the closing seconds against Houston wasn’t surprising, says MacKenzie. “Cooper,” he says, “is built for those moments.”
Which made coming up short excruciating. Flagg even wondered: Should I try again? Duke was widely viewed as a one-year pit stop on his road to the NBA, where teams pursued him by losing as many games as possible to maximize draft lottery odds, giving birth to the tagline “Capture the Flagg.”
Yet when it came time to make a decision, Flagg felt conflicted. “Was it obvious?” he asks, repeating a question. “Yes and no. If somebody could tell me that I could have that group of people for another year and go back and have the exact same team, I would a hundred percent do it. But it’s just not reality and you can’t pass up on the opportunity. You just have to do what’s best for you and move on.”
To Dallas, most likely. On lottery night the Mavericks—with a 1.8% chance of securing the top overall pick—saw their four-ball combination come up. A team that for months was maligned for offloading one franchise player (Luka Doncic) will get a chance to draft another, a 6' 8", 221-pound wing with limitless potential. The question is: Just how good can Cooper Flagg be?
“So what do you want to talk about?” It’s mid-May and Flagg is standing on the edge of a putting green on the grounds of the Four Seasons in Westlake Village, a leafy city about an hour northwest of Los Angeles. He twirls a custom-made club, emblazoned with a Duke logo and with his name inscribed on the inside. Bedard, looking for less physically taxing ways for Flagg to channel his competitiveness, steered him toward golf a few years ago. The first time they played, Bedard spotted him nine strokes. The last time he played him straight up. He hasn’t lost yet. But he will.
Prodigy is a word often associated with Flagg. He was quarterback on his youth football team. The pitcher and shortstop in baseball. Striker in soccer. “He’s annoyingly good at everything,” says his mother, Kelly. And he has to win at everything. Ping-Pong, cornhole. He’s been known to cheat at Marco Polo. “He can’t stand to lose,” Kelly says. “I think that’s why he is who he is. He doesn’t do anything halfway.”
Kelly didn’t think she’d raise a future top pick. But she guessed she might breed some basketball talent. A 5' 10" guard, she played four seasons at Maine, helping the Black Bears upset Stanford in the 1999 NCAA tournament. She met Ralph Flagg in high school. Ralph, a burly 6' 9" forward, played at Eastern Maine Community College. They dated throughout college and got married soon after. In 2004, Kelly gave birth to a pair of twins, Hunter and Ryder. Born premature, Ryder died two days after birth. Two years later, the Flaggs welcomed Cooper and Ace.
Cooper took to basketball first. Physically, he could dominate. But it was the mental part of the game that appealed to him. “Being able to beat people when you’re not more skilled than them by being smarter, playing with more IQ,” Flagg says. “That’s what I gravitated towards. Things that just make the game so in-depth. There are just so many different ways you can win.”
A twin brother—Ace is a minute older—is a lot of things. A confidant. A best friend. “Having a twin,” says Cooper, “is the greatest gift.” They also make ideal practice partners. One-on-one games in the driveway would go deep into the night. But Cooper’s real rival was Mom. Kelly quit organized basketball after college. But she didn’t quit playing. She can’t remember exactly her first game against Cooper. But she never let him win. If he went up for a shot, she blocked it. If he wanted to stop her, he’d have to defend her in the post. “He’ll beat me when he can beat me,” she told her husband. (Ralph, with little interest in getting injured, rarely joined.) By the end of sixth grade, Cooper had sprouted to six feet. The post-ups stopped working. The last time they played, she tore her meniscus. The rivalry ended there.
Cooper’s talent revealed itself early. Kelly recalls a scrimmage in first grade. On one early possession a loose ball squirted away and was headed out of bounds. Cooper—age 7—leaped after it, palming it and saving it to a teammate. He recovered, sprinted the length of the floor, got the ball back and finished with a layup. “It was a moment where I think Ralph and I looked at each other and we were kind of like, ‘O.K., that was different,’ ” Kelly says. “You don’t see a 7-year-old do stuff like that very often.”
The Flaggs were determined to cultivate his talent. Newport is a town of 3,000-ish in central Maine. Cooper needed to get outside of it. They took the boys to AAU tryouts. Kelly reached out to Bedard, a college classmate. In Cooper, Bedard saw a kid with the size of a forward and the instincts of a guard. He began developing Flagg’s ball skills. Dribbling drills. Shooting drills. Operating as the ballhandler in pick-and-rolls. Bedard’s son Kaden, a sturdy, quick-footed guard, played on the team. In practice, Bedard would cone off two-thirds of the court and make Cooper beat Kaden up the floor.
“It was a moment where I think Ralph and I looked at each other and we were kind of like, ‘O.K., that was different.’ You don’t see a 7-year-old do stuff like that very often.” Kelly Flagg
Later, the Flaggs connected with MacKenzie. To the coach, his new charge’s athleticism was impressive; Flagg was dunking by the seventh grade. But Flagg’s spongelike mind, says MacKenzie, was just as memorable. In car rides, he would study YouTube clips of the 1985–86 Celtics. “Basketball being played at its purest form,” says MacKenzie. Flagg didn’t have a favorite player, per se. He just mined pieces from them. Kevin Durant and Paolo Banchero. Jayson Tatum and Kevin Garnett. Ask MacKenzie for a comp and he offers a scorcher: “I say that he’s got the intensity of Garnett, he’s got the court sense and basketball IQ like Larry Bird, and the versatility and athleticism comparable to Tatum. I’m not comparing him directly to those guys, but I feel like he’s got a little bit of those players wired into his approach as a basketball player.”
By eighth grade, Flagg was pushing 6' 5" and needed more competition. MacKenzie reached out to Brian Scalabrine, the ex-NBA forward who was training teenagers in the Boston area. He told Scalabrine about Flagg. Scalabrine, understandably, was skeptical. From Maine? Heat guard Duncan Robinson is from Maine. Before that, you have to go back 41 years (Jeff Turner) to find a Mainer who was drafted. “He told me he’s got some 13-year-old beating up on 20-somethings,” recalls Scalabrine. “I told him, ‘No f---ing way.’ I thought it was just a trainer being a trainer.”
Still, Scalabrine invited Flagg down for a workout. He told his regulars—all high school upperclassmen or older—that a kid from Maine was coming down “to bust y’all’s ass.” At first glance, Flagg didn’t look impressive. “Long arms,” says Scalabrine. “Like they grew and the rest of him didn’t.” Flagg didn’t say much, either. Scalabrine threw him into a game. On the first play, Flagg drove right, jump-stopped, faked with his right hand before elevating and dunking with his left. “And the gym went silent,” says Scalabrine. “Everybody just stopped.”
Scalabrine ran Flagg through drills. Eight-second shot clock, player can hold the ball for two seconds. “Try to speed them up,” Scalabrine says. “Gets sloppy real fast.” Flagg, says Scalabrine, was the best player on the floor. He showed him a Kyrie Irving drill, where players must make a dozen different versions of a layup. Right leg, left hand. Left leg, right hand. And so on. A total of 128 makes. A fast time for the drill is around three minutes. Flagg finished in just over two.
“He’s a supercomputer,” says Scalabrine. “Whatever you tell him, he’ll master in 24 hours. Just picture that for one second. Think about the trajectory of a player that you could tell something one day and he figures it out the next. Chris Paul, LeBron James, those are the guys with minds like that. He’s as smart as any player I’ve ever been around. His basketball IQ is off the charts.”
You’ve probably seen the video. Last summer, Flagg earned an invite to Las Vegas to take part in Team USA’s training camp before the Paris Olympics as a member of the select team. Flagg was fresh off his final season at Montverde Academy; looking for better competition, he and Ace, who will play this fall at Maine, transferred after their freshman year of high school to the Florida hoops hotbed. Cooper was 17 and less than two months away from starting classes at Duke. On the first day he felt something unfamiliar: nerves. “I was shell-shocked,” he says. Sharing a floor with LeBron and Stephen Curry will do that.
By the second day, Flagg had settled in. He relished the level of competition. Best against the best, he told friends. During a scrimmage, Flagg bounced off a screen and faced off against Anthony Davis. He took two dribbles before knocking down a three. On his team’s next possession, Flagg crashed the glass to put back an errant three-point attempt, drawing a foul. “He put on a show,” says Scheyer.
Flagg, unsurprisingly, shrugs off the sequence. “Just basketball,” he says. But he doesn’t undersell the experience. “You get to be in that environment and when you play well, you hold your own, it builds confidence,” says Flagg. “I mean, it tells you, What can you not do? Who can you not play against at that point?”
That Flagg met that moment wasn’t surprising. In 2020, Kelly and Bedard cofounded Maine United, an AAU team. It wasn’t the deepest roster. “If Vegas saw us in the layup line, they’d be like, ‘Oh my God, you guys are going to lose by 30,’ ” says Bedard. But they had Ace in the paint, Kaden on the perimeter and Cooper everywhere else. “We didn’t look like much,” says Bedard. “But we had the best player in the nation in our age group.”
Maine United took Cooper national. Tournaments in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Orlando. The Peach Jam, a Nike-sponsored event in South Carolina for top high school players. Everyone had heard of this gangly white kid from the middle of nowhere. And just as many were eager to test him. Ralph recalls a trip to Massachusetts. Regional tournament, semifinal game. Cooper was in fifth or sixth grade. The opposing team came out face-guarding Cooper to try to deny him the ball. He scored 25 in the first half. “Pretty good,” says Ralph. “Especially when the other team has 15.”
Everyone has a similar story. Kelly remembers a tournament in New Jersey. In a close game, Cooper started sluggishly. An overrated chant bubbled up in the stands. “That’s a trigger for him,” says Kelly. Cooper scored the next eight points to blow the game open.
That’s the thing with Flagg—he lives for challenges. Montverde is a famed prep powerhouse. Joel Embiid, Cade Cunningham and Ben Simmons are among the NBA stars who have passed through. Montverde went 56–3 in Flagg’s two seasons. It’s fun to win as a favorite. Ask Flagg, though, and he’ll tell you that proving a bunch of Maine kids could play meant more. “I love being the underdog,” he says. “Always have. It gives you a little extra fuel, extra motivation every game. You get a spark. It’s a great feeling.”
Back in May, inside a sealed conference room in Chicago, Matt Riccardi tapped his leg anxiously. A year ago the Mavericks were in the NBA Finals. Now Riccardi, the team’s assistant GM, was sequestered in the draft lottery drawing room, representing the franchise on the off chance its Ping-Pong ball combination came up.
Of the 1,001 possible combinations, Dallas owned 18 of them. There was no reason to be hopeful—only three teams in the 40-year history of the lottery had won with longer odds. The first ball sucked out of the air-powered machine was 10, one of Dallas’s numbers. Riccardi nodded. The next, 14. Getting interesting, Riccardi thought. When 11 was pulled, Riccardi’s knee bounced off the leg of Andrae Patterson, the Trail Blazers’ representative seated alongside him. He glanced down at an owl sticker he brought into the room, a good luck charm provided by his 13-month-old son, Lio. The last ball, a 7, confirmed Dallas’s win. He looked back at the sticker. “Lio,” says Riccardi, “got us Cooper Flagg.”
One floor up, in a packed ballroom, there was an audible roar when Dallas’s envelope was revealed. Rolando Blackman, the ex-Mavs star representing the team on the dais, clapped furiously. Rick Welts, Dallas’s CEO, looked on in disbelief. From a front-row seat, Flagg clapped politely. He was surprised by the speed of the lottery. “I didn’t realize it was like, 15 minutes and the whole show was over,” says Flagg. He insists he didn’t have a preferred destination, and while it’s nice to go to a team built to win (the roster includes Davis and Irving, who is expected to miss a chunk of next season with a torn ACL), it won’t change his approach when he gets there.
“For me, it didn’t really matter what team I went to,” Flagg says. “Whatever team I get picked by or whatever situation I ended up in, my mindset going into any game or anytime I’m playing basketball is always try to win. I’m just an ultimate competitor and this is what I would try to do anywhere I went.”
“Whatever team I get picked by or whatever situation I ended up in, my mindset going into any game or anytime I’m playing basketball is always try to win.” Cooper Flagg
As for the Mavs, well, ask him later. He isn’t ready to dive deep into his fit in Dallas. Not out of concern that the Mavericks won’t take him—they most assuredly will—but because he is determined to live in the moment. Questions about playing alongside Davis or the inevitable talk of replacing Doncic are coming. For Flagg, they can wait. “I think the biggest thing is ... not trying to think too far into the future, not worrying about what’s coming down the road, but just focusing on right here, right now, on what I can control and just making most out of every single day,” he says.
Days that will get better. After a recent workout, Scalabrine pulled Flagg aside and told him, “I can’t help you anymore.” Says Scalabrine, “He’s past me. Everything he needs to know he needs to learn from somebody else. He needs to be working with LeBron or something. He’s beyond me.” After that the two went back to work. The NBA will be there. There was more to be done.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Cooper Flagg’s Natural Talent Through His Hoops Journey Portends Limitless NBA Potential.