Cooper Flagg regrettably does not appear to be an elite ball-knower.
The Dallas Mavericks star rookie Flagg was given a quiz on the 2000s NBA during media day earlier this week. Flagg received a pack of Topps basketball cards from his birth year (2006) and was asked about the eight players featured in the pack.
That would seem to be a pretty softball quiz for Flagg, especially since the names and uniforms were right in front of him (he only had to say if he had heard of the players). But Flagg actually ended up doing shockingly poorly.
Of the eight players that he pulled from the pack, Flagg had only heard of four of them. His ugliest misses were Hedo Turkoglu and Zydrunas Ilgauskas, both of whom Flagg did not know at all. Flagg also had slightly more defensible misses on Eric Snow and Antoine Wright.
Here is the video.
Cooper Flagg tries to recognize players from the 2006 NBA… pic.twitter.com/t9av3RdaPd
— Topps (@Topps) October 2, 2025
Flagg realistically only knew Juwan Howard (who is well-known in the younger generation as the old head coach of Michigan), Michael Finley (a former Mavericks player who is now an executive for the team), and Antoine Walker (who also used to play for the Mavericks). On the late Rasual Butler, Flagg was generously given credit for saying that he had heard of the name before.
It is surprising that Flagg did not know Turkoglu, a former 20-ppg scorer who went to the NBA Finals with the Orlando Magic in 2009 and kept playing until the mid-2010s, or Ilgauskas, a multi-time NBA All-Star who made some Finals trips of his own. While Flagg was obviously still an infant when those guys were at their peaks, there is nothing stopping him these days from binging old NBA highlights online.
But this is probably just a good reminder of how young the 18-year-old Flagg, who was the No. 1 overall pick in this year’s draft, and his other contemporaries really are. That said, players his age have managed to absolutely ace old-school NBA quizzes before, including a then-20-year-old Amen Thompson.
