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Par Joël Pütz | Journaliste sportif
Hailed as the overwhelming favorite for the first pick in the draft, Cooper Flagg is already attracting highly flattering but also controversial comparisons. Shaquille O’Neal’s recent comments have had Dallas fans in stitches…
The least we can say is that the hype surrounding Cooper Flagg is monstrous. With the NBA draft taking place in a week, the former Duke big man is practically guaranteed to be selected by the Mavericks with the first overall pick. In the United States, many people are predicting he will have a magnificent career, including former player Brian Scalabrine, who gave his opinion on the Dan Patrick Show:
I don’t do the white guy thing. I think it’s LeBron James without having to be like 260 pounds and a freight train. Cooper Flagg is a supercomputer — everything you tell him, in the next 24 hours, he’s figured that out. (…) His trainer wanted me to get my eyes on Cooper and he told me, “I got a 13-year-old that can play against your kids and hold his own.” I didn’t believe that for one second. It was another overexaggeration of a kid, but after seeing him, I totally believed it.
Shaquille O’Neal compares Cooper Flagg to Dirk Nowitzki
That’s what it’s called putting pressure on a player who hasn’t even played a single professional game yet. As for Shaquille O’Neal, the Hall of Famer also played the comparison game during an interview with the Dallas Morning News. And without going so far as to put Flagg in the same conversation as the Chosen One, the former center held him up as the successor to the greatest local legend:
He’s a great all around player. I don’t want to put too much pressure on him, but a little baby Dirk? Could be. When Dirk came in, Dirk was raw like that. He just worked on his game and trained and got on the trails and got with management and he just became a great player.
The kind of comments that don’t go unnoticed in Dallas…
To this day, Dirk remains the only player to have brought a title back to the franchise for which he scored more than 30.000 points in 21 long seasons. Suffice it to say, he’s a demigod there, and fans therefore don’t appreciate Shaq’s comparison, if only because his player profile doesn’t match Flagg’s at all. The reactions were harsh:
@IamHeartbreak_: This is lazy take. Shaq hasn’t watch Cooper Flagg play and it shows. He’s just comparing White Guys.
@AnalyticsCapper: What a terrible comp haha
@Vault93_: It’s obvious that the TNT guys don’t do much rookie scouting and that’s okay. But to compare him to Dirk speaks volumes. They have a completely different skill set.
