2025 draft thread: THE MAVS SELECT COOPER FLAGG

[Winter]

He is closer to AD type of prospect than a Luka type of prospect IMHO.

I don't disagree about your premise, but I should point out that very few teams understood who Luka was on draft night. No one saw him as "generational" then.

For the record, I don't like that term at all, and predicting that is silly in my opinion.

What I would say is that good players in college (especially Duke which is usually heavy with NBA players) or in a European league frequently find more opprtunities to score in the NBA. It's more wide open I think, and I suspect CF can easily be a 20+ ppg player. That said, I think CF's on-court value is probably more than every other prospect in the field - much more than just a ppg thing - and is what makes him the 1st pick.

An interesting comparison mught be someone like Kyrie - who is completely different than CF in regard to size and position - and yet when Kyrie came out he clearly had skills no one else had in the draft. He had advanced metrics everywhere and was the #1 pick. Kyrie scores in the mid 20s ppg as an average almost every year in his NBA career, but his value is clearly much greater than that. CF's value really shines when you add rebounding, defense, and rim protection - something Kyrie was never known for. I do think players like CF are really rare.