Cooper Flagg: the Great Maine Hope

The best player in college basketball is from small-town Maine. Is that a coincidence?

The big name in this year’s NCAA basketball tournament is #1 seed Duke’s freshman Cooper Flagg, the Atlantic Coast Conference player of the year and frontrunner for National Player of the Year. He graduated from high school a year early so he turned 18 in the middle of Duke’s season. He should be in high school right now, but instead he is the most talked about player in college basketball.

Flagg is 6’9”, high-flying, and an all-arounder: and improving outside shooter, excellent dunker, rebounder, passer, and defender.

He is expected to turn pro after March Madness and be the first white American #1 pick in the NBA draft since Kent Benson in 1977. To emphasize his versatility, a few sportswriters even mention him in the same breath with LeBron James (which is silly, but still … LeBron!).

A few observations:

First, Flagg is a member of a growing group: star jocks whose moms played college sports. His 6’9” father played basketball in junior college, while his mother played for the U. of Maine. She’s a real basketball fanatic.

Second, it’s rare for athletically adept whites to skip a year of school. It’s more common for ambitious parents to hold back their sons for a year so they’ll be more mature than their competition and get more opportunities and better coaching.

Note that the advantages of being born in January over being born in December have been intensely studied in Canada, where kids born in January go thru their junior hockey careers being nearly a year older than kids born in December.

For instance, Wayne Gretzky, recognized from an early age as The Promised One (I can recall a friend telling me in college in 1979 in Houston, not exactly the nerve center of the ice hockey world, that it was common knowledge that the 18 year old Gretzky would of course become the greatest hockey player ever), was born January 26, 1961. This is not to say that Gretzky wouldn’t have become an all-time great if he’d been born a month before, but it wouldn’t have been so universally anticipated.

In contrast, Larry Walker, born December 1, 1966 in British Columbia was devoted to becoming an NHL hockey goalie until washing out at age 19. At that point he cast around for alternative careers involving his skill set, intercepting a hurtling projectile with a stick, and decided to get serious about baseball. In the half decade of 1997-2001, when he was 30 to 34, he batted .357, making the baseball Hall of Fame.

Third is the question of race and region. Do white NBA stars tend to come from areas where they grow up competing with and learning from blacks or do they tend to come from regions where they can mature without being crushed by early-maturing blacks?

Paywall here.