Cooper Flagg Should Sue The Guardian For Premeditated Offense Archaeology

This is the strangest thing I’ve read since the last time I went to The Guardian’s website

As was clear from yesterday’s post and Ask Me Anything, I’ve got a bit of end-of-year burnout.

The rest of the posts I have planned for this month are relatively complex and will require a significant portion of my already limited brainpower. I wasn’t quite ready to dive back in today. What I needed first was a palate cleanser. Perhaps some basic, meat-and-potatoes media criticism of the “lmao how in god’s name was this published” variety.

I’d like to thank The Guardian for providing just that — and at a crucial moment, too!

The offending article is about Cooper Flagg. Flagg is a freshman basketball player at Duke University who, barring injury, will go first in the next NBA draft. He’s a 6ʹ9ʺ forward who is quite talented. He’s the subject of a bit more buzz and fascination than your average presumptive first pick because he’s an American-born white guy from Maine — unusual for such a highly touted prospect. White NBA superstars are less unusual than they used to be because of a recent influx of insane European talent — at present, two of the five best players in the league are white Europeans. American-born white superstars are much rarer, and none of them has been drafted first in 48 years.

Yesterday, The Guardian published an article (in a certain sense) about Flagg headlined “Cooper Flagg: the 17-year-old ‘cold-ass white boy’ breaking the basketball discourse.”

I’ve now read it twice and I have no idea what it’s about.

The author, Guardian features writer Andrew Lawrence, describes Flagg as “the next great white hope, Caitlin Clark 2.0,” referencing the women’s basketball player who, over the last couple years or so, became arguably the first bona fide female NCAA superstar, in the mass-market sense at least. (She’s now a WNBA rookie, where she immediately became one of the best players in the league.)

Right off the bat, this is a somewhat silly analogy. Yes, women’s basketball has been around a while, but it’s only now really coming into its own commercially. Clark was a big deal because she was doing Steph Curry–type things that hadn’t really been seen in the women’s game before.

To the extent she “broke the basketball discourse” — and I can’t say I’m entirely sure what that means — it was because she really did represent something new, and something likely to propel the women’s game forward. Flagg’s story and biography are interesting, but there isn’t really much “discourse-breaking” potential to him. Nobody thinks he’s Victor Wembanyama or LeBron James — he’s extremely talented, yes, but at the end of the day he’s a number one draft pick in the NBA. We have a new one every year, and rarely are they discursively destructive.

Anyway, forget all that, because Lawrence continues his article:

You thought Clark broke the basketball discourse? Clark at least gave her casual observers time to turn her into a culture warrior. Flagg, as ESPN’s Jay Bilas noted, is “the most popular export from Maine since lobster,” a magazine cover boy with a robust social media following who links to his Hollywood reps in his bios. He is a one-and-done college star, headed for the 2025 NBA draft as soon as Duke’s season is done — and a third of it is already gone. With too a short [sic] runway for a slow-building villain arc, Flagg is forced to cut right to the chase. He must do in four months what took Clark four years to accomplish, and that’s turn college basketball into a politically charged public square. Again.

I’m at a bit of a loss here. Why “must” Flagg “turn college basketball into a politically charged public square”? What does that mean?

To the extent I can tell what’s going on here, Lawrence is engaging in a fairly doomed offense-archaeology expedition. He has set up camp in a remote corner of a desert where there’s no reason to suspect there’s any genuine history of offense to be dug up, and yet he is digging — doggedly.

His expedition leads him — and therefore, his readers — some weird places: