“This may sound like some high praise, but the last player [who] I saw that was able to do that out of high school? His name is LeBron James.”
Julius Hodge knew he and his Division II Lincoln Lions had nearly impossible odds to steal a win over Duke at Cameron Indoor Stadium, even in an October exhibition game. But the 2001 McDonald’s All-American and former NBA first-round pick did question just how real the legend of Cooper Flagg would be.
He had a clear answer quickly.
“My overall impression was that he’s as good as advertised,” Hodge said. “It is extremely difficult to be as good as everyone is claiming you are, and I think he definitely met and surpassed that mark.”
The hype has continued to grow. And five months later, the likely national player of the year has a chance to join a short list of freshmen who have led their teams to national championships — Carmelo Anthony and Anthony Davis, among them — for a Duke team that ended the regular season as the No. 1 team in America and is favored to cut down the nets in San Antonio, according to ESPN BET, thanks to the Blue Devils’ preeminent force.
The 6-foot-9 talent has an attitude on the court that he has carried to each level of basketball after feeling slighted as an overlooked kid from Maine early on. And, as a collection of players and coaches have learned this season, Flagg is the ultimate winner. That’s also the problem — for everyone else. Five months into his collegiate career, there is no blueprint on how to defend him.
Just hopes and dreams.
“Offensively, he’s a three-level scorer that can also get fouled and get to the free throw line, knock down free throws and get to the offensive glass,” North Carolina head coach Hubert Davis told ESPN. “He can get the rebound and bring the ball up himself in transition. And probably, the thing that he does best, is he plays hard.”
So how do you stop him? The short answer is you can’t, really — you can only slow him with the right combination of size and physical play. Few opponents have been able to actually do it, but Tommy Lloyd’s Arizona squad will take aim at limiting him more in Thursday’s Sweet 16 game than it could in November, when the freshman had 24 points, seven rebounds and three blocks in just his fifth collegiate game.
Ultimately, Flagg is an NBA-ready player who could be in the running for rookie of the year by this time next year, an award that Georgia Tech head coach Damon Stoudamire won in 1996. Players at this level, Stoudamire said, just aren’t equipped to handle the tools Flagg possesses. Even if they know what to do mentally, the physical translation is the issue.
Stoudamire didn’t understand that until he actually saw Flagg play in his team’s first matchup against Duke in December.
“He has a great feel for the game, and he has all the measurables and the intangibles to be a great player,” Stoudamire told ESPN. “But I was extremely impressed with the things he did and especially, with me coming from the [perspective of a former NBA player], he looked exactly how the best NBA players looked, to be honest with you.”
It’s one thing to see the highlights on TV and it’s another to successfully employ a strategy to beat the Blue Devils, according to those who have tried to create defensive schemes to slow him — in part because it’s not only the skill set that sets Flagg apart.
“He has a mean streak,” Virginia Tech head coach Mike Young said. “He is tough. He is rugged. There is not a soft bone in his body, and he will flatten your nose for you if you aren’t ready to go.”
Paul Peterson stopped practice a few times and scolded his scout team. Then he thought to himself, “What could they do? What could anybody do to mimic Flagg in a high school practice?”
That was the challenge the head coach of Utah’s Wasatch Academy encountered when his team faced a stacked Montverde Academy team led by Flagg and other five-star recruits like Maryland star Derik Queen two years ago. Knowing a group of typical high school players would struggle to emulate a future lottery pick, Peterson had to get creative to get his team ready for Flagg, who finished with 19 points, nine rebounds and six assists in a win.
“We were just trying to make it as hard as we possibly could on the defense,” Peterson said. “We put two guys on the floor at one position and said, ‘Well, he probably has the strength of two of these regular kids.’ But he jumps way higher than them.”
Once the game started, he and his players had the same helpless feeling.
“I think they beat us by 30,” Peterson said. “There was nothing we could do with him.”
The challenge of defending Flagg has persisted at the next level, too.
Before he announced his resignation after a lengthy tenure at Florida State, Leonard Hamilton had watched and coached against the greatest college basketball players over the past 50-plus years. He had also competed against some of the top players Duke and other ACC powerhouses had produced.
Flagg is among the best Hamilton has seen — and is on one of the best Duke teams of all time, from Hamilton’s perspective.
“I think [Flagg] is an outstanding, very gifted athlete, but I think the fact that they play so well together gives him a chance to be the best version of who he is,” Hamilton said. “This edition of the Duke Blue Devils, they are the most efficient, executing team that we played against in the Duke era. Not to take away from all the great teams that Coach K had. This team just seemed to be the most connected.”
Flagg is not the first high-level athlete to play one season of college basketball before moving onto the NBA, and he won’t be the last. But the combination of his mentality and his gifts have made him the most challenging matchup in the country this season.
Former NC State head coach Kevin Keatts was on the wrong side of that experience. Once Flagg got into a rhythm against the Wolfpack — he scored 28 points in the 74-64 victory Jan. 27 — Keatts said he felt powerless.
“We played pretty well on the road, and I think we were up at halftime, and then it became the Cooper Flagg show,” Keatts said. “I mean, they did a good job of getting them in isolation where you really couldn’t help, and he took over the game. And that’s one of the things that makes him special is his ability to take over the game, his ability to make shots when he needs to.”
Added Clemson head coach Brad Brownell on Flagg: “Guys with that size normally don’t have the ability to drive and dribble the ball full court. He does.”
Even the greats aren’t perfect, though. And coaches have found blind spots in Flagg’s game.
Pitt head coach Jeff Capel, a former standout with the Blue Devils in the mid-1990s, figured he had found the key to defending Flagg: Exposing his reliance on his left hand. Flagg loves to drive left and throw his frame toward the basket, Capel thought, while daring defenders to step in front of him. So Capel’s message to his team ahead of a Jan. 7 clash with Duke was twofold: 1) Avoid the big, “SportsCenter”-worthy plays that would quiet the home crowd and 2) push Flagg to go right.
Early in the second half, however, Flagg led a fast break — with his left hand — and slammed the ball over 7-footer Guillermo Diaz Graham. It was one of the top plays on SportsCenter that night and is now featured in a Gatorade commercial.
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Cooper Flagg puts a Pitt defender on a poster
Cooper Flagg gets the steal, then runs the floor and puts a Pitt defender on a poster.
“The thing that I was impressed with was that his celebration wasn’t in [his] face,” Capel said. “It wasn’t directed towards [Diaz Graham]. Sometimes, a guy does that, and they’ll point, they’ll do something towards the opponent. His celebration was exhilaration at the play, the energy for the team.”
On the next possession, the other “weakness” Capel thought he had uncovered was also quickly debunked.
“The very next play, when Flagg came back down and they isolated him at the top, we tried to shade him, take his left hand away,” Capel said. “And he drove right by [Diaz Graham], to his right, and went in and dunked the very next one.”
Arizona State head coach Bobby Hurley found success against an earlier version of Flagg in an October exhibition game at Duke, where Hurley was a star on the Blue Devil teams that won the program’s first national titles in 1991 and 1992. The Sun Devils’ Jayden Quaintance, a 6-foot-9 freshman, played a physical style against Flagg that limited him to nine points (3-for-9) in a 103-47 Duke win that raised money for a local children’s hospital.
Still, despite his struggles, Hurley was impressed by Flagg’s energy.
“We did a pretty good job against him defensively. I don’t think we did a good job on anybody else, but he has a motor,” Hurley said. “He’s got a nasty streak to him. He’s a really competitive kid who plays both ends of the floor. He had some monster blocks in our game. He’s just kind of a warrior type of kid. He moves like an NBA player. He looks like an NBA player. It’s hard to find a weakness or something that you’d be critical of.”
Weeks later, Seattle head coach Chris Victor’s team left Cameron Indoor Stadium with a 70-48 loss to Duke, but Flagg scored only nine points in that meeting. Even though Flagg finished 2-for-7 that night, he found other ways to leave his mark (seven assists), especially on defense (nine rebounds) for a team that’s now ranked top-10 nationally in efficiency.
“You can tell his first priority is to win games,” Victor said. “His first priority is to do what he can to help that team win. For a kid in his position, you don’t always see that, right? And it permeated through the whole team.”
Following his team’s win over Oregon on Sunday, Arizona star Caleb Love said, “We’ll be ready [for Duke].” But the last time the two teams played, Flagg scored 24 points in a double-digit win in Tucson. The Wildcats might not have a solution in the rematch, either.
There’s the added layer that the version of Flagg Arizona will face Thursday is not same player the Wildcats saw in November. Like any freshman, he had to learn how to do laundry while adapting to competing with stronger, older athletes. (Keep in mind: His twin brother, Ace, is still a senior in high school, where in another life, Flagg would be preparing for the prom.)
While in most cases, Flagg exceeded expectations, there were still times against Arizona State and others when he looked like a teenager — especially as a shooter.
Through Dec. 10, he was only 8-for-36 from the 3-point line. He admitted the shooting funk bothered him so much that when he went home for winter break in December, he immediately asked his father to take him to his old high school gym so he could take dozens of shots. There, Flagg said, he grew more comfortable. The pressure decreased. And when he returned to Durham, he began to blossom into a reliable threat from anywhere on the court.
Proof? He went on to make 44% of his 3-point attempts in ACC play. Yes, Flagg has weaknesses, but they never seem to stick with him. And that’s been the problem for opposing teams. He can solve his own flaws in real time — sometimes even midgame.
In the days ahead, Flagg’s last performances as a collegiate star will also warrant talk about his future in the NBA.
Mark Madsen is convinced Flagg has all of the tools to excel there, too — he should know, he won a pair of titles with the Lakers alongside Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal in the early 2000s. It’s not easy to impress Cal‘s head coach as a result, but his team’s Feb. 12 matchup against Flagg even made the former NBA champion raise his eyebrows.
Part of the reason Madsen spent years in the NBA was because he found ways to bond with his teammates. That, he said, is one of Flagg’s strengths, too.
“It looks like his teammates love him,” Madsen told ESPN. “That’s not always the case. It’s not always the case with a player of his caliber. And so for him to be the man, to be getting everyone around him better and for that locker room, it seems like everybody really loves playing with him. That’s impressive.”
Across the board, those who have faced Flagg have been in awe of him. While trying to find his weakness or stopping him from dunking on your top players or refusing to let him dominate a game are all the things those coaches put on their whiteboards ahead of their matchups against him, the execution of those missions has been an ongoing obstacle.
There was another issue that Mike Young had not anticipated, when his Virginia Tech team lost to Flagg and Duke on Dec. 31: fatigue.
“It’s deflating. It’s like this kid is so darn relentless,” Young said. “The second you blink, the second you stand up and see what’s going on, he’s cutting behind your head for a lob. He’s getting underneath you to wedge you away from the basket for an offensive rebound. It’s exhausting. It’s exhausting playing against him.”
While Arizona might not have the answers to slow Flagg, other remaining teams could test him: Houston has J’Wan Roberts and other veteran big men who have the physical tools to frustrate Flagg. Michigan has two 7-footers in Vladislav Goldin and Danny Wolf who can create problems for Flagg. And Maryland star Queen, Flagg’s former high school teammate, is part of a respectable frontcourt that will attack the freshman star.
Plus Tom Izzo, Rick Barnes, John Calipari, Bruce Pearl and Matt Painter have had to prepare for the best players in recent college basketball history. Perhaps one of them will find the elixir other opponents have lacked.
But even if they have a game plan, how will they execute it?
The stakes are a lot higher — and the competition a lot tougher — now than when Hodge’s team saw Flagg in October. But all season the freshman phenom has lived up to Hodge’s lofty praise. And with a title on the line, Hodge isn’t going to bet against him.
Hodge just wanted to get out of that exhibition game with newfound confidence for his group after it had played a likely national title contender. It wasn’t an exciting day for his team. Forty minutes against Flagg, he said, is only fun for the people watching at home.
“He wants to win everything,” Hodge said. “Every single possession, he wants to win.”