Cooper Flagg populated social media feeds as a high school phenom. He graced magazine covers and signed sponsorship deals before taking his first collegiate dribble. Coming into the 2023-24 college basketball season, Flagg had been billed not only as the consensus choice to be the nation’s best freshman but also a short-list candidate to be national player of the year. All before his 18th birthday, which doesn’t arrive until Dec. 21.
Until Tuesday night, however, most basketball fans had never seen Flagg actually play a full live game. He put up some decent numbers in his first two outings for No. 6 Duke, but that was against inferior competition with minimal TV exposure. Tuesday’s game against No. 19 Kentucky at the Champions Classic in Atlanta, which tipped off in prime time on ESPN, was Flagg’s chance to make his first real impression. And man, was he impressive. While the rest of his teammates were clanking three-pointers or hobbling with injuries, Flagg put the Blue Devils on his back, repeatedly powered his way to the rim and singlehandedly carried his team to the brink of victory.
Then, disaster.
With the score tied at 72 and the clock ticking under 15 seconds, Flagg found himself isolated up top against Andrew Carr, Kentucky’s 6-foot-11 super senior transfer from Wake Forest. Flagg drove into the lane with his left hand, tried to spin back to his right … and lost the ball. It was scooped up by Wildcats junior guard Otega Oweh, who was fouled and sank a pair of free throws to stake UK to a two-point lead.
On the ensuing possession, Flagg again tried to do it all himself. Again, he turned it over, this time after slipping in the corner and letting the ball trickle beyond the baseline with 5.1 seconds to play. After getting fouled on the inbounds pass, Kentucky guard Lamont Butler made his first free throw but missed his second, which could have given Duke a chance to tie the game. Flagg, however, was unable to box out Oweh despite having inside position. Oweh climbed through the freshman, ripped the ball out of his hands and made two more free throws to seal Kentucky’s 77-72 win.
For Flagg and Duke, the final sequence marred what could have been an epic de facto debut. Flagg finished with 26 points and 12 rebounds — both game highs — but he and the Blue Devils could not overcome their horrid three-point shooting (4 for 23, including 1 of 11 in the second half) or the scrappy defense that spurred the Wildcats to recover from a ten-point deficit late in the first half. “Coach trusted me to go and make a play,” Flagg said afterward. “I’m glad he had that trust in me to put the ball in my hands. I’m looking for it in that moment. It didn’t work out, but I’m still going to look for it no matter what.”
Kentucky, meanwhile, left Atlanta — or as it’s commonly called in Big Blue Nation, Cat-lanta — feeling justifiably relieved, elated and proud. When Mark Pope, who played on Rick Pitino’s 1996 NCAA championship team, took over for John Calipari last spring, he inherited a program that did not have a single returning scholarship player. Pope and his newly formed staff dove into the transfer portal and signed nine players with a combined 586 career starts. Those transfers played all but two minutes Tuesday night.
In the first half, however, it was the freshmen-laden Blue Devils who looked like the older, tougher, more resilient team. They outscored Kentucky in the paint 28-6 and only had one turnover. Duke led 46-37 at the break, a margin that could have been considerably higher if not for all those three-point misses.
The Wildcats came out after intermission with a notable spike in defensive intensity. They held Duke to 29.4 percent shooting in the second half and slowly chipped away at the Blue Devils’ lead. They finally pushed ahead on a layup by Oweh with 2:40 to play and held on for dear life down the stretch.
Pope loved the energy and chemistry he saw amongst his players at halftime. “The guys do most of the fixing before I even get in the locker room,” he said. “When things are going tough, it is the psychology of us as human beings that we start to communicate less, we start to get lost in our own heads and literally and figuratively you start to turn away from the huddle. Our guys are incredibly intentional about fighting that.”
Pope also made a tactical shift in the second half to run his offense through his versatile big men, Carr (17 points, 5 rebounds, 3 assists) and 6-foot-10 senior forward Amari Williams (10 points, 8 rebounds, 2 assists). Those two were effective scorers, cutters and passers, even more so when Duke’s primary big man, 7-foot-2 freshman Khaman Maluach, was limited to 10 second-half minutes because of cramping in his right quadricep.
“I think that’s just the flow of the game,” Carr said. “That happens with the way that we play. There’s a lot of reading and reacting and we try to take advantage of how the defense is guarding us.”
Flagg’s brilliance aside, Duke’s shortcomings got exposed in the second half. Freshman forward Kon Knueppel, who led the Blue Devils in scoring during the first two games with an 18.5 average on 50 percent three-point shooting, was 1 of 8 from behind the arc against Kentucky and disappeared in the final 10 minutes. The Blue Devils were also saddled by mediocre play from 6-foot-5 sophomore point guard Caleb Foster, who finished with four points, four assists and two turnovers. Scheyer’s apparent lack of trust in his point guard led him to ride Flagg’s preternatural skills as far as it could take him — which, as it turned out, was not far enough.
“I probably could have put him in a better position, to be honest,” Scheyer said. “But he’s got to touch it and trust that good things are going to happen. I wish you could say that every time it’s going to work out, but that’s not reality.”
Duke senior guard Sion James, a 6-foot-6 transfer from Tulane, also injured his shoulder with 12:48 to play. He visited the locker room and never checked back in. Scheyer did not have any further details on James’ status in the postgame press conference.
Overall, it was a terrific night for college basketball, especially coming after Kansas’ 77-69 win over Michigan State that was, shall we say, lacking a certain aesthetic. Given the drastic reconstruction that Pope faced upon returning to his old Kentucky home, he had reason to feel good about the character and cohesiveness inside his locker room
“I like our group. If we had lost this game, I would still like our group,” Pope said. “These guys, nobody knew each other. Nobody had ever been with each other. They’ve been very intentional about getting to know each other. Three or four weeks into the summer, I had guys doing incredibly gracious, generous acts of kindness for their teammates. I really think it wins in the end.”
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