Because of Cooper Flagg, the Duke Blue Devils faced their first tough test in a while against UNC on Saturday. Thanks to Flagg, they wound up with a 13-point win anyway.
Flagg committed an obvious offensive foul with 3:18 left in the first half of last night's game, sending him to the bench with three fouls and as many points. The Tar Heels instantly ripped off a 10-2 run, then hit a bunch of difficult shots to give themselves a quick seven-point lead early in the second half. Rather than wilt, Flagg spent the game's final 15 minutes showing why NBA GMs are so high on him. Duke started to run everything through Flagg, and he notched five assists, four blocks, and zero fouls through the rest of the game as the Blue Devils won, 82-69. With little margin for error, Flagg made the right play every time, on both ends of the court. The 18-year-old is so huge and skilled that "the right play" was often something bombastic, like rotating over and erasing a layup despite his own teammate crashing into him, or driving left around intense ball pressure and dunking it, per Flagg's mother, on everyone's "fucking head."
This kind of play, unthinkable for most college players, has become standard for Flagg in his freshman season. The Maine native is putting the finishing touches on a campaign that will go down as one of the best overall campaigns for any college player. He leads the nation in box plus-minus and win shares per 40 minutes; Ken Pomeroy's proprietary advanced stats have not measured a season this good for any player, let alone a freshman, since he started keeping them 15 years ago. In traditional terms, Flagg is averaging 19.4 points, 7.6 rebounds, 4.2 assists, and 1.3 blocks for the second-ranked team in the country, anchoring the nation's second-best offense and fourth-best defense, and he has consistently raised his level month after month.
That last bit is the most impressive part about Flagg. He came into Duke with as much hype as any freshman has since Zion Williamson, but there were plenty of questions about how his game would function at the highest level. Flagg's defensive capabilities were beyond question, and he'd been penciled in atop the 2025 NBA Draft primarily for his athleticism on that side of the ball. Most of his high school tape, however, showed a scorer who got by on that athleticism. Did he really have the ballhandling and shooting skills to run an offense as a true No. 1 guy?
Flagg has proven himself there. He's improved his three-point shooting month by month as the schedule's strengthened, doubling the 25.9 mark he posted in his first month of play in November to a clean 50 percent in February. Watch him for an entire game on offense, and you'll see that he's skilled enough to both set up and capitalize on advantages. He makes high-level passing reads, and is clearly very comfortable even when defenses collapse on him. Flagg kicked off his college career by routinely dribbling into trouble, coughing up double-digit turnovers in his first seven games and then again in seven of his first eight games against ACC opponents. Since the start of February, he's down to 1.1 per game. His worst outing was a seven-turnover night against Wake Forest on Jan. 25, though when Duke hosted the Demon Deacons last Monday, Flagg had a masterful 28-point, seven-assist, three-block performance with just one TO. That's what it looks like to be in total control.
NBA teams want stars who can make difficult plays, but the ideal is still to create lots of simple ones. Through this framework, Flagg excels even among recent top prospects. He is deadly at drawing fouls, making a simple pass off the short roll, or getting to the rim in transition, and that's just as encouraging as his newfound off-the-dribble flair. Flagg's defensive playmaking is as stunning as his versatility. He doesn't really have a weakness—if I had to nitpick, I wish he were a more dominant defensive rebounder—and I can't imagine an NBA team who wouldn't thrive with him.
The professional game is becoming more positionless with each year, a shift that has dragged big men out of the paint. But if the role of the center has changed, so too has the role of the point guard. Positionless basketball is not so much a shrinking of the game as it is a convergence, where everyone on the floor has to be comfortable performing the duties of a wing: rebounding, hitting threes, guarding multiple players on the same possession. Flagg spent the second half of Saturday's game initiating the offense and blocking shots—the duties of a point guard and center, respectively. The 6-foot-9 forward stands out as a prospect because of how he embodies this futuristic ethos of basketball. It doesn't take much imagination to see Flagg at the next level, because at Duke he's already playing tomorrow's basketball.
