{"id":290516,"date":"2025-09-18T17:27:10","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T17:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/290516\/"},"modified":"2025-09-18T17:27:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T17:27:10","slug":"cooper-flagg-named-to-sports-illustrateds-most-influential-people-in-sports","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/290516\/","title":{"rendered":"Cooper Flagg named to Sports Illustrated&#8217;s Most Influential People in Sports"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Cooper Flagg already has all the hype and talk surrounding him going into his rookie season, having starred at <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/sportsdata.usatoday.com\/basketball\/ncaab\/teams\/duke-blue-devils\/1388\/\" data-autotag=\"d9e0b712-2f57-4d7c-998e-25a7ac4fbc0d\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Duke<\/a> for one year before becoming the No. 1 overall pick in the 2025 NBA Draft by the Dallas Mavericks.<\/p>\n<p>The 6-foot-9 Flagg hasn&#8217;t played a regular-season NBA game yet, but he is already named on quite a prestigious list: Sports Illustrated&#8217;s 50 Most Influential People in Sports.<\/p>\n<p>Flagg joins other athletes such as Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Lamine Yamal and Arch Manning of those who have a massive influence on sports.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.si.com\/sports-illustrated\/2025-power-list-50-most-influential-figures-in-sports\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">From SI<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>If anyone can live up to the hype of being the top hoops prodigy since LeBron James,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.si.com\/nba\/cooper-flagg-the-next-stage\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">it is Flagg<\/a>. The NBA\u2019s 2025 No. 1 draft pick has both the game and the calm demeanor to make it work. The Mavericks rookie is also positioned to become the face of New Balance\u2019s basketball line.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s a lot of pressure on the 18-year-old Flagg, but after all of the hype that surrounded his freshman season at Duke, he is certainly ready for it.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cooper Flagg already has all the hype and talk surrounding him going into his rookie season, having starred&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":266104,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3793],"tags":[2126,7,243,686,149,4057,667,666,692,2127,2125,166,318,6,55,2128],"class_list":{"0":"post-290516","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-dallas-mavericks","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-basketball","10":"tag-blue","11":"tag-dallas","12":"tag-dallas-mavericks","13":"tag-dallasmavericks","14":"tag-devils","15":"tag-duke","16":"tag-duke-blue-devils-mens-basketball","17":"tag-enabled","18":"tag-highlights","19":"tag-mavericks","20":"tag-mens","21":"tag-nba","22":"tag-story","23":"tag-story-highlights-ai-enabled"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/115226479521580487","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/266104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}