The Dallas Mavericks pulled the big lot on the Draft Lottery in the NBA and could hire Cooper Flag, the largest college talent. A stroke of luck for the “Mavs”, who suddenly get the chance to appease their own fans after the controversial departure of Luka Doncic.
The jersey colors are already right: Cooper Flagg, the star of the past college season, most recently played for the “Blue Devils”, the famous team Duke Universityin the white-blue jersey. In the same colors as the Dallas Mavericks, which won the “Draft Lottery” in the NBA on Monday evening (May 12, 2025).
Cooper Flag – a new one Hopeful For the Mavericks
The Mavericks, the annual NBA talent exchange on June 24th in Brooklyn, have the right to the number one pick. You can hire the top talent of college that is highest. In all likelihood, this will be Cooper Flag: The 18 -year -old forward is one of the most promising talents of the past few years. An athletic Two-Way player, with a strong distance, but also excellent defensive qualities. This is also why many experts assess it higher than, for example, Paolo Banchero, young star and teammate by Franz Wagner at Orlando Magic, who also came to NBA as a number one pick from Duke University three years ago.
Last year, in the Olympic preparation of the US team, Flag was one of the players who were flown in in the training sessions as sparring partners for the NBA stars. There he played against Anthony Davis, possibly his teammate in Dallas, among others.
In the NBA, a lottery is upstream to the actual drafts, in which the order of the “Draft Picks” is distributed, among the teams that are the worst sections in the past season. The lottery runs according to a complicated mathematical key, the three worst teams each have the highest probability (14 percent) to get the number one pick.
The draw itself takes place with table tennis balls, as at the kindergarten festival-the outcome can decide on the future of a franchise, for example if a talent of the century is in the raffle. The Cleveland Cavaliers received, for example, Libron James and Kyrie Irving, the later supports of their championship team. The current champion, the Boston Celtics, also built their team around Jayson Tatum, which they received in 2017 as a number one pick.
Mavericks in luck: main prize at 1.8 percent probability
The Dallas Mavericks were previously one of the few NBA teams that had never won in the 40 years since the Draft Lottery had been organized. The fact that this year she was one of 13 teams that pulled the lot with number one seemed almost surreal: the likelihood of this was 1.8 percent.
With the Mavericks you can hardly believe your happiness: “It was a hard year for us, as we all know“, said four-time Allstar Rolando Blackman, who was on site for Dallas at Lottery in Chicago. “But the most important thing is that we get the chance to further develop our franchise.”
Further distrust in Dallas to the Doncic trade
The “hard year”, of which Blackman spoke of, made the Mavericks significantly through their own decisions: In February, the MAVs had chased their franchise player Luka Doncic from the farm in a controversial deal. Since then, the team leadership of the MAVs, especially general manager Nico Harrison, has been through the fans and many media below.
The Dallas Morning News summarized the mood after the lottery message: “Dallas was finally lucky – unless Nico Harrison wipes off”. Cooper Flag can help fill the large gap that Luka Doncic’s departure left, wrote the newspaper – “Provided that the GM does not make the next catastrophic decision”.
In the NBA, it is part of the transfer policy of the clubs that they can also act and return their draft rights, for example as an encore for trades when players are exchanged between two clubs. In Dallas, trust in Harrison and his decisions according to the Doncic trade are apparently so broken that they calculate with everything: that he also sends the top talent flag that has fallen from heaven and redeem it for another player.
After the Draft lottery, Dallas CEO Rick Welts gave a first careful signal that flag could fit well into the team: “I don’t know who we take. If we get him, his previous career definitely speaks volumes. He successfully mastered every situation in which he had to prove himself.” Flagg could actually become a lucky case for the MAVS.