Sam Vecenie backs Cooper Flagg dominance with statistics, credits teammates

Cooper Flagg was been tearing up college basketball as a freshman at Duke and showing why he is the clear cut No. 1 pick in the NBA Draft. But in case there are still doubters out there, Sam Vecenie of The Athletic provided the statistics to back it up.

While doing an NBA mock draft on the Game Theory podcast, Vecenie pointed out that Flagg leads the ACC in box plus/minus, which estimates a player’s overall value to their team after calculating point differential per 100 possessions while that player is on the court.

Simply put, any given 100 possessions this season when Flagg is on the court, Duke outscores its ACC opponents by nearly 16 points. To put that dominance in perspective, Vecenie compared the number to other top players in the ACC, including some of Flagg’s teammates.

“Cooper Flagg’s in-conference BPM right now is 15.9, which is like, breaking the scale, basically,” he said. “Do you know what the No. 2 is? It’s 8.6. …By the way, Sion James is third. I think Sion James is an interesting prospect not nearly enough people are talking about, to be clear. Kon Knueppel is also fifth in this metric. Kon has been very, very good.

“But Cooper Flagg is literally lapping the field statistically in the ACC right now. He is 18 years old. He is the youngest player in this class. He is unbelievable how good he is as an overall prospect. Cooper Flagg is going No. 1 overall. Knock on wood, we don’t want this to happen I just want to be clear, I think we are at the point that if he were to get injured quite seriously he would still go No. 1 overall.”

Cooper Flagg leads Duke with 19.7 points, 7.7 rebounds and 4.0 assists per game. He recently also became the first ACC player in 25 years to record 500 points, 100 assists and 40 blocks in a single season.

There’s no question that Flagg would be the No. 1 pick if he decides to leave college after one year, and he’s proving that his hype entering the year was well-deserved. It will be interesting to see how quickly his game can translate to the next level, but whatever team that lands him is getting a player with endless potential.

Before then, however, he will attempt to take Duke on a deep March Madness run after it advanced to the Elite Eight a year ago. This season the Blue Devils currently sit at 23-3 (15-1 ACC) after a win against Virginia on Monday.