Duke guard Cooper Flagg, right, takes a shot as Kentucky forward Brandon Garrison defends during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game, on Nov. 12 in Atlanta.John Bazemore/The Associated Press
Ahead of the NBA season, Toronto Raptors’ boss Masai Ujiri wanted to have it both ways.
“We’re going to play to win, but it is a rebuilding team,” Ujiri said.
If Ujiri actually believes that – which I doubt – it was never going to work. If you’re not good in the NBA, you’re bad. And if you can’t embrace being bad, you’ll never be good.
What the Raptors needed was alternative leadership. Its stars have begun to provide that – largely from home, where they are lying around in traction.
Team No. 1 Scottie Barnes is out for the foreseeable future with an orbital fracture. Franchise No. 2 Immanuel Quickley has a torn ligament in his left elbow.
The No Name Raptors everyone wanted are here, and they are terrible. Currently 2-10, worst in the NBA, and still heading south.
For the first time in a while – a whole different Canadian basketball era – the Raptors are in with a decent shot at the No. 1 pick in the draft. This year’s prize is substantial – Cooper Flagg.
Flagg is a 17-year-old from Maine who is three games into his U.S. collegiate career at Duke. He’s been talked about like the Second Coming since he was a kid. He got his first scholarship offer from a Division I school when he was in the eighth grade.
The bulk of Flagg’s legend is based on one afternoon last summer. He was the only non-professional invited to scrimmage against the U.S. men’s team ahead of their gold-medal run at the Paris Games.
No video of that encounter was released, and no stats were kept, but Flagg reportedly dominated the best players in the world. In an arena where everything is known and seen, this secret display has created a messianic mythology around Flagg.
“He checks so many boxes, it’s scary,” Sean Ford, who oversees the U.S. national team, told ESPN later.
A player like this shows up every four or five years in basketball. Whether they deserve the label is beside the point. Hitting people with a wave of advance promotion is what matters.
Performance moves existing fans, but hype turns the casual observer into a close one. Performance is the regular supply of electricity that runs sports marketing. Hype is its jolt of jet fuel.
Victor Wembanyama was the last Flagg before Flagg. I’ve stood beside a lot of big people on this job, but standing in front of Wembanyama makes you question your understanding of physics and biology. The kid is like an IMAX screen – you have to move your head to see the top and the bottom of him at the same time.
Wembanyama has lived up to his billing. Playing on a bad team, the San Antonio Spurs, he’s already one of the top 10 players in the game.
But let’s face it – he was more fun when all we knew about him was YouTube highlights from Euro League. Caitlin Clark aside, the professional reality versus the undrafted phenomenon is always a bit of a letdown. That’s our fault, not theirs. Call us again when he or she is contending for championships.
Flagg may never be bigger than he is right now, because right now he’s imaginary. He’s a baby-faced on-court serial killer who isn’t afraid of anything, and checks so many boxes – how many boxes are there?? – that it’s scary.
Rather than anyone currently under contract, Flagg is the human resource who will power this awful Raptors’ season. That conversation has already begun picking up. As long as they are bad and Flagg is good, the team has something to talk about.
This is a species of wish fulfilment, so you don’t want to get too deep into the specifics. You’ll ruin it for yourself.
If the Raptors finish last, they will have a 14-per-cent chance of winning the draft lottery – same odds as the second- and third-worst teams. That’s one in seven. How much would you bet on one roll of a die?
There have been 35 draft lotteries held since the NBA introduced the (often tinkered with) model. The team that finished with the worst record has won seven of them – one in every five.
You see what just happened? You read one-in-seven and then you read one-in-five and you began to convince yourself there’s something to this.
That if the Raptors work for it, and are as bad as they can be, it will happen for them. That right there is the thing that makes life bearable – the belief that the world is fair, despite being surrounded by definitive evidence to the contrary.
The Raptors’ odds of getting Flagg are small. If they do get him, there’s nothing close to a guarantee he’ll be transformative, or even good.
Transformative athletes marry rare physical gifts with unusually strong, sometimes anti-social, motivations. These individuals don’t want to win. Owing to some quirk of character, they need to. Think Michael Jordan or Larry Bird. Is Flagg that type?
I don’t know. Is Luka Doncic that type? Or Anthony Edwards? Or Shai Gilgeous-Alexander? Those are three of the best currently at work, and they haven’t won the big prize yet, so they don’t qualify as transformative.
You can’t know someone is transformative until they’re winning titles. You can’t say for sure they aren’t until their career is winding down, à la Kyle Lowry. Until one or the other thing happens, Flagg, every other player in next year’s draft and half the guys in the NBA are a black box.
But that’s what’s real and sports is not selling reality. It’s selling the daydream of Elgin Baylor 2.0 coming to Toronto and establishing a Golden State-style dynasty.
Will it happen? Probably not.
Is noodling on it preferable to watching a completely tangible team win 30-35 games a year forever? Infinitely.