The Dallas Mavericks are off to a tough start to the 2025 season at 1-3, and no player has embodied the team’s uneven first week more than rookie Cooper Flagg.
Flagg’s NBA baptism came at the hands of Victor Wembanyama in the opener, and after a pair of solid nights against Washington and Toronto, the No. 1 overall pick was given another welcome to the league moment by the reigning champion Thunder.
Flagg scored just two points in 31 minutes of play on Monday night against OKC, going 1-for-9 from the field and not recording a single assist. Flagg was a -20 in his 31 minutes of play and found himself on the bench as Dallas tried to mount a fourth-quarter comeback. The rookie was seen with an ice pack on his left shoulder after getting banged up on a box out earlier in the game, but the decision for him not to close out the game was a coach’s decision from Jason Kidd.
“It wasn’t his night tonight,” Kidd said, via ESPN. “We’re a team, and so we understand that the group that was out there put us in the position to win the game. He wasn’t on the floor, but he was cheering for his teammates.”
Flagg, to his credit, didn’t use his shoulder injury as an excuse, saying they’ll get tests on it, but he thinks it’s just sore, and didn’t pout after getting left out of the late-game rotation. The rookie took it all in stride and understood why Kidd didn’t put him back in down the stretch.
“The way the game was going, we had a group out there that was doing really well and was on a run, so I see where Coach was at with that,” Flagg said. “And I mean, I was flat. I wasn’t myself. I wasn’t impacting the game at a high level, wasn’t doing the right stuff. So obviously, that’s an easy decision for Coach. He was just out there trying to win the game.”
A rookie season is all about the learning experience. For all the talk coming into this season about Dallas being a great place for Flagg to develop in a winning environment, right now he’s being placed in an incredibly uncomfortable, new position. Kidd has thrust the point guard role on him, not dissimilar to what he did with a young Giannis Antetokounmpo in Milwaukee, and while the idea is to build skills that make him a better playmaker and star later, in the immediate, there will be some serious growing pains.
Monday night, we saw those growing pains in both a figurative and literal sense. Flagg’s difficult night offensively was predictable against an elite Thunder defense on his first-ever NBA back-to-back. On top of that, he added a shoulder injury that no one seems to think is particularly severe, but was another reminder of the physicality and challenges of life in the NBA.
