Upside Swings NBA Draft Podcast · Bryce W Hendricks

Cooper Flagg Scout

·1 hr 49 min·5 clips

Cooper Flagg’s hands, footwork, and timing turn him into a disruptive defender at every level.

Bryce Hendricks opens by bringing the show back after a long gap. He says the plan is to come fast and furious again, just like last year. This episode is built around one prospect: Cooper Flagg. Cooper Klein and Stone Hanson join in with the usual loose back-and-forth. They joke about being washed, about not seeing each other in a while, and about getting back together to glaze Cooper. The tone stays casual, but the evaluation is serious. The first real focus is defense. The panel treats Flagg as already a great defender for his age. The question is less whether he can defend and more which matchups he can hold up in. The group thinks he can probably live on players like Cade Cunningham or Jayson Tatum in isolation because of his length and the kinds of shots those players usually want. Quicker guards who get all the way to the rim are a different problem. Most bigs should not be a disaster either. Stone even sketches a Jokic-type usage where Flagg would not need to guard the center straight up the whole time. That leads into a broader point about how a team could use him as a help-side defender or secondary stopper. From there, the episode moves to offense. Bryce argues that playmaking is the better place to start than scoring when trying to identify a real star. He frames the question around who can create the first advantage and then punish it as a passer. Stone says his own view of Flagg changed after going back through high school and Duke film more closely. He says he was blown away by how elite the passing is.

As heard by us

A Cooper Flagg discussion that treats projection like a debate, not a verdict.

This episode is a scouting-room discussion about Cooper Flagg, and it opens by leaning on the defensive case before widening into the larger question of how an 18-year-old can already shape an NBA game on both ends.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a serious Cooper Flagg draft deep dive, this is the one to hear.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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