Who is Cooper Flagg? 5 things to know about top-ranked Duke commit

Duke men’s basketball landed ESPN’s top recruit in the class of 2024 on Monday when five-star forward Cooper Flagg announced his commitment via Slam Magazine.

Here are five things basketball fans should know about the 16-year-old star.

Flagg Is the Projected No. 1 Pick in 2025

Duke should make the most of Flagg’s presence on campus, since he probably won’t be there for long. According to most NBA Draft experts, he is projected to go at the top of the 2025 NBA Draft, and scouts have speculated that he could be “one of the better No. 1 overall candidates of the decade.”

At 6-foot-9, he can handle the ball in both half-court sets and in transition, and his passing is one of his best attributes.

“Comparing him to a single NBA player is very difficult because of how diverse his game is,” Flagg’s AAU coach Andy Bedard told ESPN. “The reality is, you’d have to take a premier skill set of multiple players and create a ‘super player’ that I don’t think we’ve seen before.”

Flagg Hails From an Unlikely Hometown

Newport, Maine (population: 3,133 in 2020) isn’t exactly a hotbed for professional basketball prospects, but Flagg put the tiny town on the radar of scouts. During his freshman season, Flagg attended Nokomis Regional High School, where he became the first freshman to win Maine’s Gatorade Player of the Year award and led the school to a state title after a number of losing seasons.

The next summer, Flagg and his twin brother Ace transferred to Montverde Academy, which is one of the premier prep basketball programs in the country. At Montverde, he impressed in several high-profile showcases, including the Hoophall Classic in Springfield, Massachusetts, and raised his profile nationally.

Flagg was slated to announce his commitment last week, but he opted to wait in the wake of the Lewiston shootings just over an hour from his hometown.

“All of our focus should be on supporting the victims, their families, and law enforcement,” Flagg wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Everything else can wait. My heart is with Maine.”

Flagg Lists Larry Bird as a Major Influence

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the region where he grew up, Flagg fashioned parts of his game after NBA legend Larry Bird. He told Slam Magazine that his family would put on clips of the Celtics from the 1980s in the car when they traveled hours to and from AAU games.

“We would always either have the ’85 or ’86 Celtics championship games on or the Magic Johnson vs. Larry Bird movies. It instilled Bird’s mindset within me and Ace. How he was always the hardest worker, no matter what,” recalls Cooper. “Especially from that Celtics team that played against the Rockets, it was more about the teamwork and the ball movement.”

Flagg Has Already Impressed NBA Stars

Perhaps Flagg’s best performance of the summer in 2023 came when he impressed at Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry’s camp with his athleticism, size, length, competitiveness and skills.

Celtics star Jayson Tatum was impressed by Flagg’s mindset after Flagg attended his camp (like Flagg, Tatum went to Duke).

“He’s got an edge about him, not arrogant,” Tatum told Jeff Goodman. “He knows he’s good, but he realizes he’s got a long way to go. He’s going at guys, going at the pros. He was trying to block every shot, getting every rebound. He wasn’t playing cool. He was playing hard, competing. He was asking questions a lot, listening.”

Duke Has a Stacked Recruiting Class

Top prospects don’t always make a college basketball team a contender, given that they are much younger than other programs that feature fifth-year seniors and transfer-portal stars. Still, the Blue Devils now have Flagg (No. 1), Isaiah Evans (No. 8), Kon Knueppel (No. 22) and Darren Harris (No. 45) out of the graduating class of 2024 (all rankings via ESPN). They are also reportedly still in the running for Dylan Harper (No. 2).

Expect the Blue Devils to be one of the NCAA’s biggest stories next year.