If you haven't already hopped aboard the Cooper Flagg hype train, you better get on now because soon enough, this sucker is going to be filled to max capacity. The 17-year-old Flagg, who will be playing for the Duke basketball team this upcoming season, has been on the radar of NBA teams for a couple of years now, but his appearance and performance on the United States Basketball Select Team this summer seems to have accelerated everyone's collective excitement. But given the gushing quotes that were coming out of Las Vegas, that's understandable.
More recently, however, Cooper Flagg's NBA future received a ringing endorsement not from the players he'll be battling on the hardwood, but from the suits who will be responsible for scouting Flagg throughout his freshman season at Duke and then bringing him into the league.
In a poll of 20 NBA executives and scouts conducted by ESPN's Jonathan Givony and Jeremy Woo — asked the question, who will be the 1st overall pick in the 2025 NBA Draft. 16 of the 20 individuals polled said that Cooper Flagg would be their choice.
“I haven't studied this class deeply enough yet and I'm sure our boards will all change, but from what I saw at Hoop Summit and in Vegas with USA Basketball, good luck catching that guy,” one voter told Givony and Woo. “[Flagg] could start for our team tonight and make a huge impact with his toughness, feel and instincts on both ends. His shooting looks good also.”
The only other players who received votes in the poll were the incoming tandem of freshmen at Rutgers, Dylan Harper (2 votes) and Ace Bailey (1), and V.J. Edgecombe (1), who will be a freshman at Baylor this upcoming season after making a name for himself this summer during Olympic qualifiers while playing for Bahamas.
Can Cooper Flagg lead Duke to first National Title in a decade?
The last time the Duke Blue Devils cut down the nets at the conclusion of the NCAA Tournament was in 2015, when a squad led by a trio of talented freshmen — Jahlil Okafor, Tyus Jones, and Justise Winslow — outlasted Wisconsin in the title game and gave Mike Krzyzewski the fifth and final championship of his legendary coaching career. Blue Devils head coach Jon Scheyer, who was an assistant under Coach K in 2015, hopes that in his third season as Krzyzewski's successor, another loaded freshman class can net the same result.
Cooper Flagg is far and away the top prize and the widespread expectation is that he'll compete not only for Freshman of the Year honors, but also National Player of the Year honors as well. But Flagg will be joined by four more top twenty recruits — Khaman Maluach, Isaiah Evans, Kon Knueppel, and Patrick Ngongba II — as well as returning guards Tyrese Proctor and Caleb Foster. Jon Scheyer also nabbed a couple of under the radar transfer portal acquisitions in former Purdue forward Mason Gillis and Tulane's Sion James, a 14 point per game scorer who has led the AAC in minutes per game each of the last two seasons.
Duke will have plenty of competition for the 2024-25 crown. The two-time defending champion UConn Huskies are gearing up for a three-peat with a roster that head coach Dan Hurley claimed may be his most talented yet. As is the case just about every year, Kansas comes into the season with a roster that looks to be championship-caliber, and Alabama, after making their first Final Four last year, expects to be back in the hunt this season as well. But where Duke will have the advantage over just about every team they face is that they will often times have the best player on the floor in Cooper Flagg.
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