Some NBA Landing Spots For Cooper Flagg
A great piece from Ricky O’Connell with a twist by us.
Our SBN colleague Ricky O’Donnell has a piece up with six great landing spots for Cooper Flagg in June’s NBA Draft.
Standard caveat: no one has any idea what to expect before Monday’s Draft Lottery, so everything is speculation until then and even after, most everything is still speculation.
His top six choices for Flagg are:
- Washington.
- Brooklyn.
- Chicago.
- Charlotte.
- Portland.
- Dallas.
In our view, the most important thing is to go a stable, well-run franchise, which rules out Washington and (sadly) Charlotte.
We’d sub in San Antonio, since the Spurs have been a stable franchise for decades now and, for many of those years, truly great.
Otherwise though, he could do worse. Here’s how we’d order our (now) five.
- San Antonio. As you probably know, the Spurs have a habit of winning NBA lotteries, with earlier home runs David Robinson, Tim Duncan and most recently, Victor Wembanyama. Aside from Wembanyama, Flagg would also partner with De’Aaron Fox, Stephon Castle and Jeremy Sochan, which would be a great, great young core. It would also be a wonderful spot for Kon Knueppel.
- Chicago. Putting Flagg with Matas Bezels and Josh Giddey would be wild. Toss in Coby White, not to mention fellow Brotherhood member Tre Jones, and Chicago would be a lot of fun.
- Portland. The Trailblazers have some fun pieces: Donovan Clingan, Scoot Henderson, Deni Avdija, Sharron Sharpe and Matisse Thybulle, to name a few.
- Dallas. One of the older teams on the lists here, the Mavs boast Klay Thompson, Kyrie Irving, Anthony Davis, Caleb Martin, Dante Exum, Max Christie and Dereck Lively, like Irving, part of the Brotherhood. Irving is recovering from an Achilles injury so we’ll have to see where he is. However, a frontcourt with Davis, Lively and Flagg would be dynamic defensively.
- Brooklyn. The Nets have work to do. D’Angelo Russell, ever flaky, is 29. Beyond him, they have Cameron Johnson, Nic Claxton, a Brotherhood rep in Dariq Whitehead and not a lot more. However, they have shrewdly stockpiled draft picks and could build around Flagg over time.
All of these would be nice fits in one way or another but our guess is that Flagg would love to suit up for Boston. He’d have to go as a free agent in a few years and would have to take a less lucrative deal than he would with whoever actually drafts him, but our guess is that he’d love to be a Celtic.