Cooper Flagg Is In A Great Situation After The NBA Lottery. His Teammates? We’ll Have To See.
The NBA Draft lottery is over and it appears that, barring a major trade, Cooper Flagg will be a Dallas Maverick, where he’ll join fellow Brotherhood members Kyrie Irving and Dereck Lively.
Almost immediately conspiracy theories popped up that claimed the lottery was rigged. What can you say? It’s a tradition at this point.
Thing is, there are at least two very strong arguments against it.
Ernst and Young manages the lottery and if they participated, they’d lose an awful lot more than their NBA account. That would be a death knell for one of the nation’s biggest accounting firms. Not worth it.
Markets. If the NBA was going to fix the lottery, Dallas probably wouldn’t have been the choice. It’s the fifth biggest market. Philadelphia is fourth and Chicago is third and both are bigger basketball towns. Does rigging it for Dallas even remotely make sense?
That aside, Flagg sounds set and hopefully happy to go to Dallas. At least he avoided the Wizards and Hornets.In the mock drafts following the lottery, let’s look first at CBS: Kon Knueppel unfortunately would go to Washington at #6 while Khaman Maluach would be taken by San Antonio at #14 where he would back up and possibly play with Victor Wembanyama. That would greatly accelerate his development.
ESPN, by contrast, has Maluach going to New Orleans at #7 while Knueppel would go to Brooklyn with the #8 pick.
ESPN also has Tyrese Proctor going to Phoenix with the #52 pick and Sion James going at #53 to Utah.
Looming over the draft: the sudden possible availability of of Giannis Antetokounmpo. Still in his prime, Antetokounmpo would be heavily desired by, well, everyone. Put him with Anthony Davis and Dallas is a strong contender. Same with San Antonio.
