YouTube Gold: Cooper Flagg is Off The Charts

Basketball, more than any other sport, finds guys who come up off the beaten path or in surprising ways. Larry Bird was from French Lick, Indiana. Jerry West from Cabin Creek, West Virginia. Bryant Reeves was from Gans, Oklahoma, population 312. Trajan Langdon came out of Anchorage, Alaska.

We may have another guy like that coming along.

Cooper Flagg, who has called Duke his “dream school,” is from Newport, Maine.

Generally speaking, you don’t see a whole lot of great prospects from Maine. It’s the most rural state in the country, according to Wikipedia. Not sure how anyone beats Alaska there, but okay.

Perhaps because you can practice so much of basketball on your own, a driven kid in French Lick, or Alaska, or Newport, Maine, can get really good before he really gets out in the bigger basketball world.

And Flagg is really, really good. And he’s not just good at scoring. Based on this video, he’s also a brilliant passer, a really good shot blocker and, generally speaking, an excellent player.

And he’s only about 14.

As we mentioned the other day, he and his twin brother, Ace, are off to Montverde. It’s an excellent decision. This guy has tremendous potential.

It’s always possible that he’s just way ahead of his contemporaries physically, but you can’t make up the passing. He has instincts.

We’re very curious about his brother. Cooper is seen as the better player, but they’re so young. We could see Ace blowing up too.