Description

Cooper Flagg arrived at Duke with the kind of hype that rarely survives contact with a real season, and then he outran it anyway. Playing his only college year for the Blue Devils in 2024-25, he averaged 19.4 points, 7.5 rebounds and 4.2 assists, won the Wooden and Naismith Awards as national player of the year, and helped Duke to a 35-4 record and a Final Four berth. The run nearly stalled in the ACC tournament, when he badly rolled his left ankle against Georgia Tech and had to be wheeled out for X-rays; he fought back to help Duke through the postseason before the Blue Devils fell to Houston. That single college season was enough. Dallas won the 2025 NBA Draft lottery on a 1.8% chance and used the top pick on Flagg, a 6-foot-9 forward who could guard multiple positions and initiate offense at the same time. He signed his rookie contract that July and, at 18, walked into a Mavericks organization still reeling from the trade of Luka Doncic months earlier and facing a season complicated by Kyrie Irving's recovery from a torn ACL. Flagg did not ease into the league. He started all 70 games he played as a rookie, averaging 21.0 points, 6.7 rebounds and 4.5 assists, and became just the third rookie in 45 years to reach 20 points, six rebounds and four assists a game, joining Michael Jordan and Doncic. He and Jordan remain the only rookies since steals entered the record book in 1973-74 to lead their own team outright in points, rebounds, assists and steals in the same season. Late in the year he put together a 96-point weekend that included a 51-point game against Orlando, making him the first teenager in NBA history to score 50 in a game. The season had its costs. A midfoot sprain in February cost him eight games and the Rising Stars showcase, and it ended early again in the regular-season finale when he sprained his left ankle chasing a rebound, closing the book on a Dallas team that finished a disappointing 26-56. None of it kept him from being named the 2025-26 NBA Rookie of the Year, edging former Duke teammate Kon Knueppel in one of the closer votes in the award's modern history and becoming, at 19 years and 112 days, the second-youngest winner ever behind LeBron James. This card is Flagg's true rookie issue, pulled from the Instinct insert set within 2025-26 Topps Chrome, printed in his first season wearing a Mavericks uniform after the draft that reshaped the franchise's plans around him.