Few Things Will Make You Feel Old As Hell Like Watching Cooper Flagg Be Unable To Name Several NBA Players From 2006

Candice Ward. Getty Images.

As sad as every Mavs fan was and probably still is when it comes to Luka Doncic no longer playing for Dallas, the good news is Adam Silver and the NBA were nice enough to pull a move right out of the David Stern playbook and rig the Lottery in such a way that that somehow a team with only a 1.8% chance of winning the Cooper Flagg sweepstakes ended up walking away with the top prize. What a coincidence!

By all accounts, even though he's only played two Summer League Games and is just beginning his first training camp, all the clips we've seen so far suggest that Cooper Flagg's hype is warranted and that he's going to be just fine in terms of making an instant impact for the Mavs in Year 1

That's all fine and good and I'm happy for Mavs fans after the hell they've been experiencing since February, but that's also not the point of this blog. The point of this blog is this bad boy

As I've started to enter living life as an "old", every once in a while, the sports world gives you a reminder/kick to the dick of just how old and washed up you are. Normally, it's when you're watching a game and the son or daughter of an athlete you loved growing up is now the one playing professional sports. That's always a mindfuck. I know personally I've had that feeling as more and more NBA players from my youth are starting to get inducted into the HOF (Dirk, Pierce, KG, Webber, Melo, Dwight etc). That's also weird as hell, because it feels like just yesterday I was watching them play.

And then there's something like this from Cooper Flagg. I mean….2006?!?!? I get that it was technically 19 years ago, but there's no way my millennial brain can accept that we're already at the point where the current generation of young NBA stars have no clue who any player was as recently as 2006. I get it if a casual fan had no idea who those players were, but that is not how I would describe Cooper Flagg. He's a basketball sicko, so I found this to be extremely upsetting.

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Do the youth really not know about Hedo Türkoğlu?? Everything you see now with 6'10 wings/bigs and how they play, Hedo was doing that shit in the early 2000s. It's why those Magic teams were so good. They were one of the early adopters to spacing and three point shooting. In my opinion, Hedo is very underrated when looking back at that era, and this kind of proves it. 

No love for Big Z? Nobody was more frustrating to play than Big Z. Everything told you he should have been awful given he was super slow and not very athletic, but the next thing you knew he was putting your favorite team in the Thunder Dome. The guy made multiple All Stars! 

I will say, it was not at all surprising that Cooper immediately knew Antoine Walker given he grew up a gigantic Celtics fan, and everyone with a brain knows he'll one day return to New England to play as a Celtic. He basically cannot wait to be teammates with Jayson Tatum. Talks about it all the time. Look it up.

Antoine Wright was a great throwback, not because he was all that good or anything (although he was a Mav!), but because one time in high school we played Wright when he was at Lawrence Academy, and it was one of the most insane experiences of my basketball life. I'm pretty sure he had 30 at the half while doing whatever he wanted on both ends of the floor. That was one of the first moments I remember seeing what NBA talent looked like up close (he went to Texas A&M then the NBA), and let's just say there wasn't a whole lot of that in the Eastern Independent League (shoutout Bancroft) back in 2001-05.

But my biggest takeaway after watching that video is the fact that we all really are getting old as hell. You know it's happening, you know there's no way to stop it, but it's not until videos like this come out that really make it set in for me. I feel like 2006 just happened. I was at ASU living my best life as a 19 year old idiot, and now we're here and it's 2025/about to be 2026 already? That's bullshit. 

So to any young stoolie that may be reading this blog, just know, this day is coming for you one day as well. I know it probably doesn't feel like it's close, but it is. Definitely closer than you think, so just be ready. If we're being honest, just me typing that sentence made me feel even worse and like some old ass boomer because that's the exact type of shit I used to hear when I was 19. God dammit.