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Player Cooper Flagg

Now that he's committed, I can bring this up.
There is this obscure stat that I've been tracking, of a player who has more 3 pts FGs, assists, blocks, steals, than they have turnovers, for an entire season.
It kinds encapsulate a complete player who can make shots, pass, play defense inside and out, and not make mistakes, all at the same time.
In the history of Duke basketball only one player managed this, Shane Battier, and he did it for 3 season in his 2nd, 3rd and 4th seasons, and if you remove the 3PTFG part he did it all 4 years.

No other Duke player has ever accomplished this, not even the reduced version that doesn't count 3PTFGs. The 3 closest was Grant Hill in 1994, he had the assists and the steals but he didn't block enough shots, and Zion in 2019 when he had pretty high number of assists, steals and blocks, he just turned the ball over too much. if he could have kept his turnovers to 58 instead of 78 he would have done it. Derek Lively also came close last year, he had the assists and the blocks, and he kept his TO low enough to give himself a chance, he just had too few steals, only 17 and he needed 24. But if you included the 3PTFG criteria nobody has even come close.

I've been looking at other players at other schools and I have yet to come cross any other player who's managed this for an entire season. I'm about 95% confident now that Battier is the only player anywhere that has ever done this.

Which brings me to Cooper Flagg, I think he has a shot at this next year, his biggest challenge is if he can manage to keep his TOs down .
 
I think he'll be handling the ball too much to keep his turnovers that low. Battier's role in the offense was generally pretty simple. I expect Flagg to do more creation off the dribble.
 
@LastHearth, this social media post from Pitt made me think about your obscure stat. It would seem that 60+ blocks and 60+ 3PM would be a good start for the Battier club.

 
Sure enough, while Flagg entertained an avalanche of recruitment offers from big-deal programs (including UConn, Georgia, and Michigan), he announced Monday that he’d taken the red pill and will be playing for the Duke Blue Devils—the widely loathed upper-crust crucible of mid-South rich kids and Caucasian hardwood prospects.
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Oh hey tired narrative tropes that haven't been culturally updated since 2007. Of course the author can't even get that right, and gives himself away with the line about "mid-South" kids. Mark Titus would never!

Duke is one of the most legacy-rich schools in the sport—with five March Madness championships and a reputation for cultivating a fandom that is perhaps a little more elitist (and some would say racist) compared to the rest of the fleet. Many of those charges are associated with Duke’s former longtime head coach, Mike Krzyzewski, who often espoused the school’s focus on “scholar-athletes” that come from a different stock compared to the typical sort of college basketball player. Hmm, I wonder what he meant by that? Here’s Krzyzewski, in an interview from 1997, courtesy of Bomani Jones, who dedicated a whole segment on his HBO show to why Black Americans hate Duke.
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Citing the very unbiased Terence Moore and Bomani Jones, with very recent source material from 2011 and 1997, respectively.

Grayson Allen—whose penchant for seemingly dirty fouls renders him, to me, one of the most abominable players in basketball history
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In basketball HISTORY.



The author is a 32 year old -- he was a teenager at oldest when Duke last resembled anything like the caricature he's penned. This isn't written with real perspective and genuine conviction; just a cheap cosplay trying to bang the drum with old hits to drive traffic to a internet publication at the forefront of a rapidly dying click-bait industry (which emphatically, cannot come fast enough)
 
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Devilsforlife said:
With the exception of the Grayson years, Duke hatred - especially this type - has been so forced since like 2010.
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We've been in serious Uncle Rico territory now for at least a decade, with this kind of commentary completely divorced from any Gen Z and younger cultural consciousness. At best there's a few stragglers left such as Tate Frazier, but anyone who isn't a niche figure spreading this stuff is typically a dinosaur. At least acknowledge you're decrepit, cringe worthy relics with no purchase anymore!
 
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Man, that guy hates Duke. I'm glad I've found the healthy alternative of betting money on teams I dislike in order to release any lingering mental health issues born from sports fandom, rather than writing lengthy articles to display my derangement to the world over something so irrelevant and stupid.
 
Chances of Flagg being remembered as the greatest white Duke basketball player ever are rather low, so the headline is objectively dumb to begin with. I mean, maybe for the current no-attention-span generation, Flagg will be the GOAT for a year or two, but certainly after 5-10 years, his historic footprint will look much smaller compared with Laettner's. It seems impossible for Flagg to win two national titles in one season, as a starting point of that debate.
 
Has the guy even heard of Laettner, because if he had it would seem unnecessary to add the qualifier "white" to "the greatest Duke player" title.
 
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