Cooper Flagg

Published April 19, 2026 · By The Basketball Fans Editors

Full name

Cooper Bowman Flagg

Born

2006-12-21, Newport, Maine

Nationality

American

Height

6′9″ (206 cm)

Position

Power forward / Small forward

Teams

Dallas Mavericks

Cooper Flagg is the first NBA rookie since Michael Jordan to lead his team in points, rebounds, assists, and steals in the same season. He was the first overall pick of the 2025 NBA Draft, selected by the Dallas Mavericks (then in the strangest lottery position in modern league history: a 39-43 team that had traded Luka Dončić four months before draft day). He is, in 2026, the unanimous Rookie of the Year and the player around whom the Mavericks’ next decade has been planned. He is also the first Duke one-and-done top pick since Zion Williamson in 2019, and the first NBA #1 overall pick ever from the state of Maine.

He turned 19 years old on December 21, 2025.

Newport, Maine

Cooper Flagg was born December 21, 2006 in Newport, Maine, a town of about 3,000 in Penobscot County, an hour north of Portland. His mother, Kelly Bowman Flagg, played four years of Division I basketball at the University of Maine and finished her career as the program’s all-time three-point makes leader. His father, Ralph Flagg, played college basketball and coached AAU teams in the Bangor area for two decades. Cooper has a fraternal twin brother, Ace Flagg, who is also a serious basketball prospect (currently committed to the University of Maine for the 2026-27 season).

Cooper played his eighth and ninth-grade basketball at Nokomis Regional High School in Newport. His ninth-grade year (2020-21) he averaged 21 points and 12 rebounds per game and was the first Maine player to be named to ESPN’s national top-25 high-school ranking before completing his sophomore year.

The decision to leave Maine came in the spring of 2022. Cooper and his family chose Montverde Academy in Florida, the same prep school that had produced Joel Embiid, Ben Simmons, and RJ Barrett. Cooper joined the Montverde program for his junior year (2022-23) and reclassified up a grade in the summer of 2023, allowing him to graduate a year early and enter college at age 17.

The reclassification put him on track for the 2024-25 college basketball season. Duke, Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina, UConn, and UCLA all recruited him. He committed to Duke in October 2023 for head coach Jon Scheyer.

Duke

Flagg’s one season at Duke (2024-25) was, by every standard college basketball metric, one of the three or four best freshman seasons in NCAA history. He averaged 19.2 points, 7.5 rebounds, 4.2 assists, 1.4 steals, and 1.4 blocks per game. He shot 48.1% from the field and 38.5% from three. He won the Wooden Award and the Naismith Award as the consensus National Player of the Year, becoming the first freshman to win the Wooden since Anthony Davis at Kentucky in 2012.

He led Duke to a 33-4 regular season, an ACC tournament championship, and a 2025 Final Four appearance. The Blue Devils lost to Houston in the national semifinals, with Flagg scoring 27 points in the loss. He declared for the NBA Draft three days later.

The 2025 Mavs lottery

The 2025 NBA Draft was the strangest in modern league history because of what had happened to the Dallas Mavericks four months earlier. On February 1, 2025, the Mavericks had stunned the league by trading Luka Dončić to the Lakers for Anthony Davis, as covered in detail on our Luka biography. The Mavericks finished 39-43, missed the playoffs, and entered the May 12, 2025 NBA Draft Lottery with the 11th-best lottery odds.

They won the lottery anyway. The Mavericks had a 1.8% chance of jumping to the first overall pick. They jumped. The team’s lottery representative, general manager Nico Harrison, spoke briefly to the cameras after the Mavs’ name came out of the envelope: “We have a lot of work ahead of us.” The basketball-Twitter consensus that night, including a viral Bill Simmons take, was that the Mavericks had been compensated by basketball karma for the Luka trade.

The Mavericks took Flagg first overall on June 25, 2025. Anthony Davis FaceTimed Flagg from his summer home in Los Angeles. The Mavericks held a press conference the next morning at American Airlines Center; Flagg, in his first words to Dallas reporters, said: “I’m going to be a Maverick for as long as they want me here.”

The 2025-26 rookie season

Flagg’s first NBA season was a Rookie-of-the-Year coronation. He averaged 19.8 points, 7.2 rebounds, 5.1 assists, 1.6 steals, and 1.2 blocks per game across 76 starts. He led the Mavericks in points, rebounds, assists, and steals, the first NBA rookie to lead his team in all four categories since Michael Jordan with the 1984-85 Bulls. He shot 46.2% from the field, 35.4% from three, and 81.0% from the line. He was named to the All-Rookie First Team unanimously.

The Mavericks finished 26-56, the third-worst record in the Western Conference. The team’s struggles were not Flagg’s; he was the only Mavericks player to start more than 70 games at any position. Anthony Davis missed 38 games with various injuries. Klay Thompson (acquired in 2024 free agency) missed 22 games. Kyrie Irving played only 19 games before tearing his ACL on March 3, 2026. Dallas, by mid-March, was running a starting lineup of Flagg plus four G-League contracts.

Flagg played through it. He scored a career-high 39 points against the Memphis Grizzlies on April 1, 2026. He had a 28-point, 12-rebound, 10-assist triple-double against the Spurs on April 8. He won Rookie of the Month honors for February, March, and April.

The 2026 NBA Awards were announced on April 17, 2026. Flagg was named Rookie of the Year unanimously, the first unanimous selection since Karl-Anthony Towns in 2016. He received first-place votes on all 100 ballots.

The comparisons

Larry Bird, in a March 2026 Athletic feature on Flagg by Tim Cato, compared Flagg to himself: “He sees the floor like I did. He’s bigger, he’s quicker, and he’s a better defender. The shooting is going to come. The passing is already there.” Bird’s comparison is, by basketball-historical convention, the highest compliment a 67-year-old Hall of Famer can give a 19-year-old rookie.

Other comparisons in the basketball-media commentary through Flagg’s rookie year: Andrei Kirilenko (the Russian-Ukrainian Utah Jazz forward of the early 2000s, similar steal-block defensive profile), Kevin Garnett (similar versatility), and Lamar Odom (similar passing-from-the-frontcourt skill set). The ceiling-case comparison, made cautiously by analysts including Kevin O’Connor at The Athletic and Jonathan Givony at ESPN, is to a young Larry Bird who can defend at multiple positions.

What’s next

Flagg is, in 2026, 19 years old, under his rookie-scale contract through the 2028-29 season at $13.7 million per year. The Mavericks, projecting forward, have him as the franchise centerpiece for the next decade. Anthony Davis, 33 years old in 2026, will likely either retire or be traded by 2028. Klay Thompson will be retired by 2028. The 2026-27 Mavericks roster, as of April 2026, looks like: Flagg, AD, Thompson, Kyrie (assuming successful ACL recovery), and a high 2026 draft pick.

The Mavs have won five lotteries in the franchise’s history. Three of those (Mark Aguirre 1981, Dirk Nowitzki 1998, Luka Dončić 2018) produced franchise-defining cornerstones. The fourth (Cooper Flagg 2025) is on track to be the fifth.

The 2026 NBA Draft is in June. The Mavericks will pick fifth.

Gear

Shop official Cooper Flagg jerseys and fan gear on Fanatics, or grab a card blaster to start a Flagg collection now.

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Sources

• Basketball-Reference: Cooper Flagg.
• The Athletic, Tim Cato, “The Mavs Lottery, Cooper Flagg, and the Luka Karma” (June 2025).
• The Athletic, Tim Cato, “Larry Bird on Cooper Flagg: ‘He sees the floor like I did’” (March 2026).
• Yahoo Sports, “Cooper Flagg’s rookie season delivers a Rookie of the Year coronation” (April 2026).
• Bangor Daily News, archive coverage of Flagg’s high-school years in Newport.
• Duke Athletics, official 2024-25 season records.