The impending arrival of Flagg – the widely-anticipated top pick in the draft unless Dallas and Harrison decide to shock the basketball world once again – means the Mavericks will replace Dončić with one of the game’s brightest young talents.
At Duke, Flagg sometimes looked like he was playing a different game than the opposition. There were few things he couldn’t do, even though he was among the youngest players in the country; he didn’t turn 18 until the season had already started. He averaged 19.2 points, 7.5 rebounds, 4.2 assists, 1.4 blocks and 1.2 steals in 37 games for the Blue Devils, who lost in the men’s Final Four to the University of Houston in the final minutes.
His trophy case from his one year in the college game is staggering. He won the Naismith Award as college basketball’s top player and won national player of the year by five of the six organizations that hand out the honor. He was the ACC player of the year, the ACC’s rookie of the year, a consensus first-team all-American and was the East Region Outstanding Player as the Blue Devils steam rolled their way to the Final Four.
“It’s been a rough year as you all know,” Rolando Blackman, Mavericks ambassador and four-time NBA All-Star, said in an ESPN interview after the lottery. “We’ll get a chance to move our franchise forward … It’s really, really a great honor, and it’s an important piece of the puzzle because we want to hoop down in Dallas.”
Blackman said that Flagg “can hoop, he can play,” adding, “There’s a lot of great players in that draft class … We will see how the guys get together and being able to make our team better which is exactly what we want to do.”
An outstanding two-way player, Flagg will hope to fulfill Harrison’s oft-repeated pledge in the wake of the Dončić trade: that defense wins championships. Dončić’s relative lack of defensive prowess was the main reason that Harrison justified the trade publicly, although reports after the deal indicated there were questions about his fitness, commitment and disagreements with team personnel that helped drive a wedge between the Slovenian star and the Mavs.