On Saturday night, Cooper Flagg and his Duke men’s basketball team will compete against Houston in the Final Four in San Antonio, hoping to get one step closer to the Blue Devils’ sixth national championship in program history.
Even if they don’t get to enjoy their one shining moment on Monday night after the NCAA title game, their star player will at the very least walk away from the season with a notable piece of hardware.
Flagg, the Duke freshman phenom and projected No. 1 pick in the 2025 NBA draft, was named the Associated Press national player of the year Friday.
The 6-foot-9 forward becomes just the fourth freshman to ever win the award, joining Texas’ Kevin Durant in 2007, Kentucky’s Anthony Davis in 2012 and Duke’s Zion Williamson in 2019. He’s also the eighth Duke player to claim the honor, the most of any program in the sport.
Flagg beat out Auburn forward Johni Broome in what effectively became a two-man race for the award over the past three months. They were the only two players to receive first-place votes, with Flagg nabbing 41 of the 61 possible votes.
In his first and likely only college season, the Maine native enters the Final Four averaging 18.9 points, 7.5 rebounds, 4.2 assists, 1.4 steals and 1.3 blocks per game while shooting 48.3% from the field and 37.4% from 3-point range.
With his output, Flagg lived up to the immense expectations following him to Duke. Even after reclassifying, Flagg was the No. 1 overall player in the 2024 recruiting class, serving as the centerpiece of a top-ranked Duke recruiting haul that included fellow five-star prospects Kon Knueppel, Khaman Maluach and Isaiah Evans.
Behind Flagg, the Blue Devils are 35-3, which included a 19-1 mark in ACC play. The 35 victories are two shy of matching a single-season program record and the team’s net efficiency on KenPom is the second highest in the rankings’ history, which dates back to 1997.
