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3 hours ago
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The Dallas Mavericks are all but certain to take Duke standout Cooper Flagg with the first pick in next week's NBA Draft, and one NBA Champion detailed his experience working with him.
Retired NBA forward Brian Scalabrine, who won the 2008 NBA Championship with the Boston Celtics, recalled his time coaching Flagg at a camp when the budding star was in high school.
A 13-year-old Flagg showed up while Scalabrine was training teenage basketball players in the Boston area, and he was blown away by Flagg. SI's Chris Mannix detailed the encounter.
"Scalabrine threw him into a game," Mannix wrote. "On the first play, Flagg drove right, jump-stopped, faked with his right hand before elevating and dunking with his left. 'And the gym went silent,' says Scalabrine. 'Everybody just stopped.'”
This made an impact on Scalabrine, and it led him to make some illustrious comparisons to who Flagg can be as a player.
“He’s a supercomputer,” Scalabrine said. “Whatever you tell him, he’ll master in 24 hours. Just picture that for one second. Think about the trajectory of a player that you could tell something one day and he figures it out the next. Chris Paul, LeBron James, those are the guys with minds like that. He’s as smart as any player I’ve ever been around. His basketball IQ is off the charts.”
After continuing to work out with Flagg, Scalabrine came to a humbling conclusion.
“He’s past me," Scalabrine added. "Everything he needs to know he needs to learn from somebody else. He needs to be working with LeBron or something. He’s beyond me.”
English (US)