PORTLAND, Ore. — In the olden days, before texting, yours truly was in the Alamodome to cover Game 5 of the 1995 Spurs-Lakers second-round playoff series when my newfangled contraption called a cellphone rang.

The caller was a Mavericks source, with an update on that season’s Rookie of the Year race between Jason Kidd and Grant Hill.

“Looks like the NBA will announce the winner tomorrow and it’s going to be close.”

How close?

“Maybe historically close.”

So in the May 17, 1995, Dallas Morning News print edition — kids, believe or not the DMN didn’t publish online until 1997 — I wrote that the race was a photo finish, naively missing what my source really meant.

The media vote was a tie. Kidd and Hill were named co-Rookies of the Year, one of several shared milestones that forever link them in basketball history.

Thirty-one years later, another dazzling young Maverick finds himself in a ROY race dead heat with two weeks left in the regular season. We’re of course referring to forward Cooper Flagg and Charlotte guard Kon Knueppel: Duke teammates, roommates and close friends, no less.

Most predictor sites and betting services show Knueppel with a slight lead, but with Flagg fast surging since his March 5 return from a left midfoot sprain.

With all due respect to Charlotte’s terrific young sharpshooter, this should not be like the Kidd-Hill comparison of ’95. This shouldn’t be a pro or Kon argument. Stack their seasons alongside one another, Flagg is full mast; Knueppel 80% of that.

Knueppel’s season has been elite. Flagg’s has been historic.

Knueppel, 20, is the youngest player under 22 to make more than 250 3-pointers in a season. Flagg’s metrics put him in the rookie-season company of LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Luka Doncic, Oscar Robertson and Larry Bird.

It also happens Flagg’s coach knows a thing or two about great rookie seasons.

“He’s been incredible,” Kidd told The Dallas Morning News after the Mavericks’ Friday morning shootaround in Portland’s Moda Center. “The expectations of what he was supposed to do, I think he’s delivered even more so than that.

“The numbers speak for themselves. He’s done everything he can do to put our team in position to win. We just haven’t had the timely makes with all the clutch games.”

Well, the numbers should speak themselves, but as a courtesy for the 100 media members who vote for ROY, we’ll go ahead and amplify:

— Flagg is the only one who ranks among the top five rookies in scoring (1st, 20.4 points per game); rebounding (4th, 6.6); assists (2nd, 4.7); steals (3rd, 1.1); and blocks (5th, 0.93).

— Flagg is on his way to becoming the eighth rookie in NBA history — and third in the last 40 years — to average at least 20.0 points, six rebounds and four assists. The others are Doncic, Jordan, Bird, Robertson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Elgin Baylor and Sidney Wicks.

— He is the second-youngest player in history to score 1,000 or more points, behind only James. And on Jan. 29, Flagg scored the most points (49) in history by a teenager.

The opponent that night in American Airlines Center? Charlotte and Knueppel, who scored 34 points.

That should resonate as the signature night of this ROY race, but it seems a sizable segment of voters deem Charlotte’s 39 wins to Dallas’ 23 as substantial weight in Knueppel’s favor.

Here’s an admittedly Dallas-centric evaluation of that: Charlotte is ninth in the East. It’s not as though Knueppel catapulted the Hornets to the East’s upper tier — in the manner of Bird’s rookie season in Boston in 1978-79 (a 32-win improvement) or David Robinson’s in San Antonio in 1988-89 (a 35-win improvement).

Besides, Knueppel joined a franchise aided by the returns of young talents LaMelo Ball and Brandon Miller after both missed much of last season with injuries.

Flagg was supposed to be the lucky one, but the opposite happened. He was supposed to get to play alongside Anthony Davis, and potentially Kyrie Irving. Instead, Flagg and Davis played 20 games together and Irving was shelved for the season once Dallas’ playoff hopes plummeted.

Perhaps most impressive, Flagg, the youngest player in the NBA, quietly has shouldered the burden of almost singlehandedly pulling the Mavericks’ fanbase from their depths of post-Doncic trade despair.

“He’s so positive,” Kidd said. “He’s gotten better and better as the season has gone on. He’s all about competition and he wants to win.”

Indeed, every fiber of Flagg’s on-court persona exudes a desire to win, while playing for a franchise whose best interest since at least February has been to lose for improved draft lottery odds.

Flagg’s ROY drive sustained a blown tire when he missed eight games from Feb. 12 to March 3 with the foot sprain.

Yet in the 12 games since his return, despite initial rustiness, Flagg has enhanced his diverse talents, a clear indication Kidd’s early-season decision to play him at point guard was a beneficial litmus test.

In those 12 games, Flagg’s averages are 20.3 points, 7.0 rebounds, 6.8 assists, 1.5 blocks and one steal.

Get this: According to the Mavericks’ research, Flagg is the only player in the NBA averaging at least 20 points, 7 rebounds, 6 assists, 1 steal and one block since the All-Star break.

Perhaps unfortunately for Flagg, some ROY voters probably tuned out the Mavericks during this 4-24 late-season skid, but according to the betting platform Kalshi, Knueppel’s percentage lead dipped from 60%-40% to start this week to 52%-46% on Wednesday.

That’s perhaps an indicator of how volatile this race remains.

Back in 1995, there were no such things as hourly prediction markets or weekly NBA.com Rookie Ladder rankings.

Hill, coincidentally a Duke product like Flagg and Knueppel, was that season’s leading All-Star game vote-getter among all players, not just rookies.

Sure there was excitement in Dallas, where the Mavericks improved from 13 wins the previous season to 36, but they missed the playoffs and Kidd returned to his native California for the offseason.

“I assumed Grant had won Rookie of the Year,” Kidd recalled Thursday. “And so when I got a call from my agent saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got some good news,’ I was like, ‘Oh?’

“He said ‘You got Rookie of the Year. But there’s a little twist to it: It’s a tie.’

“I was like, OK. That’s incredible. Grant had an incredible year. I don’t know how this happened, but cool.’

“It was a shock, I think, to everybody.”

Including a certain Dallas sportswriter who failed to grasp the gist of his source’s heads-up phone call.

Here’s a friendly heads-up to this year’s ROY voters: If you vote for Knueppel, all due respect to his outstanding season, you’ll be on the wrong side of history. Because history, and most metrics, will deem Cooper Flagg to have had the best rookie season of 2025-26.

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