Cooper Flagg has been crowned the NBA’s Rookie of the Year following a nail-biting voting contest with Kon Knueppel, his former teammate from Duke.
“I was watching Kon just because that’s one of my brothers,” Flagg said on NBC. “We have that connection, and we’re always going to be there for each other. I was watching him as a fan as well, but there’s also going to be that competition at the same time.”
The Mavericks forward received 56 of the potential 100 votes for first place, while the Hornets guard, Knueppel, had 44 of the votes. No other player received a single vote for a first-place finish.
Cooper Flagg received 44 votes for finishing second place, but no votes to be third in the race. Meanwhile, Kon Knueppel had 55 second-place votes and one vote for being in third place. That same media member voted for VJ Edgecombe ahead of Knueppel in the race, but clearly, Flagg was a clear favorite for a top-two finish.
The Rookie of the Year averaged 21.0 points, 6.7 rebounds, and 4.5 assists while shooting 46.8% from the field and 29.5% from beyond the arc.
Since steals were first recorded in 1973–74, Cooper Flagg and Michael Jordan are the only rookies to lead their team in total points, rebounds, assists, and steals. Flagg is the second-youngest Kia NBA Rookie of the Year winner (after LeBron James).
After the Dallas Wings’ star Paige Bueckers won Rookie of the Year in the WNBA last season, Flagg is the second athlete from a Dallas-based team to win this honor recently. Bueckers, after congratulating Flagg for his award, challenged him for the next target in his career.
“Yo, what’s up, Coop? Congrats on winning the Rookie of the Year, not bad for a first rodeo, right? Now, let’s see who gets that ring for Dallas first,” said Bueckers.
Each vote that a player receives is assigned points. In this race, Flagg and Knueppel were only separated by 26 points (412 points for Flagg, 386 for Knueppel).
The only time since 2002-03, when they first began recording these points, that a race has been closer than this was in 2021-22 between Scottie Barnes and Evan Mobley (15-point gap then).
The race was nail-bitingly close this time as well, since there was a lot of discussion in the media around the nature of the votes, since the NBA decided to move the voting to after the play-in tournament, which may have impacted the voters’ opinion, as Knueppel made it to the play-in tournament with the Hornets, and Flagg’s Mavericks did not.
There were even conversations of this potentially being a situation where the NBA awards co-rookie of the year to both players, so you can understand how closely the media had been monitoring this race.
Cooper Flagg Reveals His ‘Welcome To The NBA’ Moment
After addressing the race on NBC, Cooper Flagg was asked to reveal his ‘Welcome to the NBA’ moment from his rookie season.
“I would say I have a pretty standard, easy one, when I just look back to my first game. As I said, I didn’t feel extremely comfortable out there, and when I was being matched up with Victor [Wembanyama], it was a different experience,” said Flagg before the NBA Showtime panel erupted in laughter.
“He was dunking from everywhere and taking step-back threes, so that was definitely one of those moments for sure,” concluded Flagg.
This shows that while the Rookie of the Year is an exceptional achievement for the young 19-year-old, he still has a lot of talent to overcome in the rest of the league and many more milestones to conquer. Onwards and upwards from here for Cooper Flagg.
