The final chapter of Cooper Flagg’s rookie season was written in capital letters. Before his ankle sprain cut things short in the finale, the 19-year-old delivered a closing stretch of basketball that left the entire NBA talking about almost nothing else.
Over a three-game stretch to close the season, Flagg averaged a staggering 40.3 points per game, anchored by a 51-point performance against the Orlando Magic that made him the first teenager in NBA history to score over 50 points in a single contest.
He followed that explosion with a 45-point, nine-assist, eight-rebound performance against LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers, a near triple-double in what amounted to one of the most complete individual performances of the entire NBA season.
The two-game total of 96 points in back-to-back games was enough to make him only the second player in history alongside Wilt Chamberlain to drop over 95 points in a two-game stretch as a rookie.
The surge had immediate consequences on the award race. Before the three-game explosion, Knueppel had been the betting favorite at around minus-300. After Flagg’s back-to-back scoring eruptions, the odds flipped entirely, with Flagg moving to the lead position at around minus-250.
Not everyone was impressed with how the surge was manufactured, though. Some critics pointed out that Flagg was averaging 15 shot attempts per game throughout most of the season before suddenly jumping to 30, 27, and 25 shots in those final three games on a team with nothing to play for, arguing that shooting as much as possible in garbage situations is a different kind of performance than the sustained excellence Knueppel provided across a full season on a winning team.
Flagg himself acknowledged he was playing in a lost season with his team out of contention, but maintained that it is genuinely difficult to fully enjoy individual milestones when the team is trailing by double digits through most of the game.
Whatever the context, what Flagg did in those three games simply had never been done by a teenager in the history of the sport. The ankle eventually stopped him. Nothing else could.
