Cooper Flagg Had 29 Points, 11 Assists and Five Steals. Only James Harden Has Matched That Since 1973.
Cooper Flagg is 19 years old and four games into his second NBA season. On Monday night in Miami he put up 29 points, 11 assists, six rebounds, five steals and three blocks, and the Mavericks won 113-109 at the team that spent its summer trading for Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Per Mavericks PR, citing the Elias Sports Bureau, Flagg is the second player since 1973-74, when the league began officially recording steals and blocks, to match or beat that line in all five categories. The other one is James Harden, who did it with 41 points, nine rebounds, 11 assists, six steals and three blocks.
The numbers are absurd and they are not new
He also became the first teenager in NBA history with at least 25 points, 10 assists, five rebounds and five steals in a game. He was 19 years and 309 days old when he did it.
This is the same player who, as a rookie, became the youngest to score 35 in a game, breaking LeBron James’s record by five days, and then the youngest to score 40. He won Rookie of the Year and led Dallas in points, rebounds, assists and steals, something only Michael Jordan had done as a rookie since steals were first tracked.
Four games into this season he is averaging 25.0 points, 6.3 assists, 5.3 rebounds, 3.7 steals and 1.7 blocks. He opened with 32 in Houston, left the Indiana game early with a shoulder sprain, missed a game against San Antonio, and came back to do this.
He closed the fourth quarter himself
Twelve of his 29 points came in the fourth. With 31 seconds left and Dallas up two, he blocked an Andrew Wiggins three-point attempt. He shot 12 of 23 from the floor and played just under 40 minutes.
Dusty May, in his first season coaching the Mavericks after winning the national title at Michigan, has watched this up close for a month and still sounded surprised afterward. “That’s a bad dude to get in the paint like that and finish,” May said. “He’s got ice water in his veins. He’s unfazed.” May also said Flagg will have “some 15, 20 assist games” once Dallas finds its offensive rhythm, which is a wild sentence to say out loud about a 6-foot-10 forward.
Flagg’s own version was shorter. “It’s just kind of how I’ve always played.”
Miami is 0-4 and Giannis had a triple-double
The Heat acquired Antetokounmpo from Milwaukee in June for a package built around Tyler Herro, Kel’el Ware, Jaime Jaquez Jr., Kasparas Jakucionis, the 13th pick in the 2026 draft and two unprotected future first-rounders. On Monday he had 29 points, 15 rebounds and 11 assists, his first triple-double as a Heat player, and Miami lost anyway.
That is Miami’s fifth 0-4 start in franchise history and its first since 2008-09. The Heat missed 11 of 25 free throws. Bam Adebayo, who finished with eight points, said this week that “the outside noise wants to make me the scapegoat.”
Erik Spoelstra, who also coaches Team USA, spent his postgame talking about the teenager on the other bench. “He’s a winning player, a force of nature with his style of play,” Spoelstra said. “He imposes his competitive nature on every possession.”
Stop hedging
Yahoo’s Kevin O’Connor called this an “MVP type of performance” and immediately added that it is too early to talk awards. The caution is understandable and unnecessary. Dallas is 2-2 with P.J. Washington scoring 20, Kyrie Irving adding 18 and Walter Clayton Jr. going 6 of 7 off the bench, and the Mavericks never once reached .500 at any point during Flagg’s rookie season.
He is 19, he is the best player on the floor in every building he walks into, and the only real question left is how long the rest of the league gets before he is the best player in it.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
