CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Walking through the Hilton Hotel in uptown Charlotte on Wednesday morning, you couldn’t go more than five minutes without hearing his name uttered by a media member, even though he wasn’t in the building.
Cooper Flagg.
Will he live up to the hype? Is he the best college prospect since Zion Williamson? Could he win the national player of the year award?
The 6-foot-9 freshman headlines Duke’s No. 1-ranked recruiting class and is the clear frontrunner to be taken in the top slot at the 2025 NBA Draft. A Maine native, Flagg’s rise as a small-town kid who puts defense first — and is an extraordinary athlete with a high-level IQ for his age — makes him the most intriguing player in the sport. He will be talked about daily all year, and, in all likelihood, many more years to come. Yet, with all of that hype surrounding the Gatorade and Naismith National High School Player of the Year, Flagg isn’t interested in all the buzz.
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“Cooper has a lot of humility, and I mean a lot of humility,” Duke head coach Jon Scheyer said of his top-ranked freshman. “Watching him, you see a confidence and a chip that he plays with, and I love that too. But he genuinely wants to be coached on every little thing, and you either have that or you don’t. … It just doesn’t make him better — it makes our team better because it sets the tone.
“If he’s going to accept coaching to the highest degree, everybody else is as well. He [has] been terrific with that.”
Flagg, who this past summer became the first collegian to join USA Basketball’s gold medal team in training camp ahead of the Olympics since Doug McDermott and Marcus Smart back in 2013, averaged 16.5 points, 7.5 rebounds, 3.8 assists and 2.7 blocks per game to lead Montverde Academy to an undefeated 33-0 record and a national championship as a senior in high school.
“Cooper doesn’t care about the media,” said Tyrese Proctor, who is expected to be Duke’s leader in the backcourt in his junior season with Jeremy Roach off to Baylor and Jared McCain being a one-and-done freshman (76ers). “He’s just a straight competitor. Obviously, with all of the hype and stuff at 17 [years old], you’d think it would play with him a little bit, but it doesn’t faze him at all. He’s a winner and that’s all he cares about. He’s a team player and he can do everything.
“He’s so versatile. The level of competitiveness he has, that’s what makes him so good.”
“Cooper Flagg is as advertised,” sophomore guard Caleb Foster said. “Everybody talks about him, but he’s just a humble kid who fits in with all of us. He doesn’t try to make himself more than what he is. He’s just a winner who competes every day at practice. He has one mindset: to take his team as far as he can.”
“He knows how to win, and he does everything he can to win,” Proctor added. “It doesn’t matter if there are five seconds or 10 seconds left in a game — or five minutes — he’s going to do everything he can in that moment to win. I work with him all the time, and he’s always in the gym.”
As for the big picture in Durham, it’s a critical third season for Scheyer, who has gone 27-9 in each of his first two years at the helm with an Elite Eight trip that ended with a heartbreaking loss to 11-seed North Carolina State last March. While Flagg is the marquee name, he’s not the only highly-touted freshman in Duke’s top-ranked recruiting class, with NBA Academy Africa product Khaman Maluach and 6-5 wing Kon Knueppel as the other top names in a six-member class. Couple that with four transfers, including Mason Gillis from Purdue and former Tulane star Sion James, and you get a combined 10 new faces on Duke’s roster.
“I’m surprised people aren’t talking more about Khaman Maluach,” Foster said of the 7-1 center who represented South Sudan in Paris as the youngest player at this summer’s Olympics. “He’s a freak athlete. … I’ve never played with anybody like him. He has a 9-8 wingspan. It’s not fair. He protects the paint and I think he’s ahead of his time.”
Scheyer was extremely complimentary of Knueppel, who averaged 25.9 points, 8.6 rebounds and 5.3 assists per game as a senior at Wisconsin Lutheran High School en route to earning the state’s player of the year honors.
“Every one of our freshmen has had moments, but what stands out about Kon is he’s giving us those moments every day,” said Scheyer. “He has the right habits. From offensive footwork to defensive footwork, he’s been a natural. He’s got toughness from within. He knows how to play through contact and he can really shoot the ball. He’s been awesome.”
What’s the top challenge for the 37-year-old Scheyer heading into the 2024-25 season? It’s balancing the top-flight freshman talent with breaking through and getting Duke to the place where expectations always are inside Cameron Indoor Stadium: a Final Four.
“It’s the toughest thing for me because I’m naturally very impatient,” Scheyer said. “I’m an impatient person, but I also feel that’s why I’ve been able to find success in my career and just not feel like I have to wait — and to just go for it and win. But at the same time, it is a process. I don’t want our guys just hanging their hat on winning and losing. I want to go 40-0. We want to win every game, but I want them controlling their effort every day and their competitiveness every day, and I think that all comes naturally.
“I haven’t mastered it by any means, but I do know we have to be patient. We have two of the five youngest players in college this year, and I’m betting on those guys, but we will go through some growing pains at times.”
John Fanta is a national college basketball broadcaster and writer for FOX Sports. He covers the sport in a variety of capacities, from calling games on FS1 to serving as lead host on the BIG EAST Digital Network to providing commentary on The Field of 68 Media Network. Follow him at @John_Fanta.
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