2025 draft thread: THE MAVS SELECT COOPER FLAGG

[myconsumerclub]

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.

Look at how long it took Dirk to become a recognized great generational talent. He was never talked about like that in the early years of his career and he was picked later in the draft as well. These guys today are okay but give me a Dirk again any day of the week. Cooper at least can shoot a 3 without looking like he is mentally handicapped like Shawn Marion and we all thought highly of Marion anyway. We have Cooper in his beginning stages and he is already touted as generational. If he can be that I hope we keep him forever and don't decide to trade him off for an old has been. The more I read about the league taking great players away from teams to gift them to bigger market teams like LA and then gifting the team losing the player with the first pick it makes me think that this league is a lot more orchestrated than it first appears but hey if we benefit from it once in a while its an okay thing. As long as they are not fixing games I am happy.