With former Duke men's basketball player Cooper Flagg a virtual lock to go No. 1 overall to the Dallas Mavericks in the 2025 NBA Draft, the storied Blue Devils program is about to add to its illustrious history.
Once it's made official on Wednesday night in Brooklyn, Flagg will become the fifth No. 1 pick in Duke basketball history. Duke already owns the record for most top picks with Elton Brand (1999), Kyrie Irving (2011), Zion Williamson (2019) and Paolo Banchero (2022) previously receiving the honor.
Kentucky is the only other school to have more than two players selected first overall, having John Wall, Anthony Davis and Karl Anthony-Towns go No. 1 in a six-year span.
Flagg will also be the second-youngest No. 1 pick in NBA Draft history at 18 years and 186 days old. That's only eight days older than LeBron James was in 2003 when he went first to the Cleveland Cavaliers out of high school.
Though Flagg won't don the Dallas cap until Wednesday, his selection is a near certainty. Duke men's basketball's social media accounts have even referred to him as the No. 1 pick already and FanDuel lists him as -100000 odds to go first.
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The Duke freshman worked out for the Mavericks on June 17 and all indications are Dallas came away somehow even more excited about the prospect than it was before.
“Flagg had dinner Tuesday night at Dallas' famed Bob's Steak & Chop House with several Mavericks officials,” Mark Stein wrote the next day.
“I'm told Flagg, not surprisingly, then insisted Wednesday on spending roughly an hour on the floor showing off his skills to a much larger gathering of organizational representatives and — also not surprisingly — made a very favorable first impression. Impressive is the word we keep hearing.”
The Mavericks have held the No. 1 overall pick just once in their history before this year, taking Mark Aguirre from DePaul first in 1981. They used their last top-two pick on current head coach Jason Kidd in 1994.
a]:text-link [&_>a]:underline">Russell Steinberg covers Major League Baseball and the New York Liberty for ClutchPoints. A baseball and basketball lifer, he has written for Boardroom, SLAM, SB Nation, The Next, and more. He graduated from NYU in 2012 and still returns to serve as PA announcer and occasional broadcaster for the school’s basketball and volleyball teams.