There is nothing wrong with Cooper Flagg naming Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Larry Bird and Kobe Bryant as his NBA Mount Rushmore. The problem is whoever decided to run his answer under the word "controversial."
Start with the answer itself. Jordan and LeBron are the two names nearly every serious list starts with. Bird is a Boston legend that a kid from Maine grew up on. Flagg comes from a family of Celtics fans; his mother Kelly has talked about the household watching old film of Bird, McHale, Parish and Ainge. Kobe is the guy an entire generation of young players idolized, and Flagg praised him for "complete respect for the mentality and the way he carried himself." That's a normal basketball opinion. You could argue the fourth spot in a hundred bars and never settle it.
This is a story because Flagg said it once at his Dallas introductory press conference in June 2025, the day after going No. 1 in the draft, and then said nearly the same thing again on Kevin Hart's Cold As Balls, which dropped on Netflix on September 20, 2026. A 15-month-old opinion got a second life, and outlets treated a rerun like breaking news. "Shocks many." "Questionable." The only questionable thing is treating a teenager's hypothetical like a scandal to farm clicks.
A few reasonable voices said Bird was a surprising pick and Kobe probably isn't a top-four player if you're ranking coldly. That's it. That's the "backlash," a mild style quibble about the last two names, treated like outrage. If you're genuinely angry, be honest about why: Flagg left off the guy you'd have picked. That's a preference. It isn't his job to validate yours.
The one objection with real weight is the Kobe one, and it deserves better than getting buried under "shocks many." There's a serious argument that celebrating Kobe's "mentality" glosses over serious controversies in his past, and that his warm public reputation is partly the product of years of careful image work. That's a conversation worth having about how we canonize athletes. But making a 19-year-old the venue for it is misdirected. He was asked a fun question and gave the same answer millions of people his age would give. If the culture reflexively lionizes Kobe, that's on the culture. The rookie just absorbed it.
The fact that Flagg picked Bird over more "correct" modern names is the least surprising part of the whole thing. Kids love who they grew up watching. Larry Bird himself once said he'd rather have Kobe than LeBron on his team. Nobody wrote a hit piece about that.
Flagg backed up the version of himself worth caring about on the floor, winning Rookie of the Year with 56 of the 100 first-place votes. What's tired is the question format itself, worn out enough that outlets can recycle a fifteen-month-old answer and call it news. Aim your annoyance at the people who keep asking it and repackaging it. The teenager just played along, politely.
