Mavericks executive gets brutally honest about landing first pick, Cooper Flagg

It's a little less than a month away from the 2025 NBA Draft, meaning Dallas Mavericks fans still have to wait about four weeks until Cooper Flagg is officially a Mav. Those four weeks will be filled with persistent rumors of Nico Harrison trading the pick, but every indication points toward the team sticking and picking Flagg, who became one of four freshmen in men's basketball history to win the Wooden National Player of the Year Award. The other three were Kevin Durant, Anthony Davis, and Zion Williamson; pretty good company to be in.

While Dallas executives haven't talked about Flagg directly on the record, it's pretty clear that there is a lot of excitement in the building about landing him, as many team officials were worried about that the financial future of the team looked like after the Luka Doncic trade.

Matt Riccardi, the Assistant General Manager of the Mavericks, hopped on the "Take Dat Wit You" podcast, which is posted directly by the Mavericks, where he was asked about landing the first pick and likely taking Flagg.

"I would say, more than anything, it makes the [championship] window 20 years instead of three... We're trying to win it every single year and the guys that we have, we felt like before this draft lottery, that we had a good enough team to win a championship. Now we get the chance to add the number one pick to this? We're ecstatic for that, but it's business as usual for us and whoever we get, which the kid from Duke, as you've mentioned, you're bringing in someone that's won everywhere he's been, ho's played above his age everywhere he's been, who's going to walk in and be ready to go. Whatever that role will be, we see it as more of another thing, we get to bring in these guys, the 21-year-olds, the 22-year-olds that have on this roster around slowly through the veterans that we have on this team. So, when those guys are done playing, I think it'll be way more than three years, I'm hoping it's five, six, seven years when they decide to hang it up, some of our older veterans, but when they're done, they're passing the torch and they've shown these guys how to become NBA champions... That window is extended for 20 years."

The championship window is exactly why many people were confused about the team willing to trade away Luka Doncic, as they shrunk their title window from 10-12 years to three to four without getting enough value back in return. Flagg helps extend that window, especially if he lives up to the lofty expectations that have been placed on him already.

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