The best part of the first week of the NBA season is seeing preconceptions built up over a summer spent consuming season previews shattered by the hard reality of basketball games. Heading into this season, one such widely shared preconception was that the Rookie of the Year field was scarcely worth discussing, what with Cooper Flagg looking like a purpose-built destroyer for the modern game. He was going to start and play a significant role for a team with real aspirations, the thinking went, so why even take anyone else's chances seriously? This was occasionally followed by the odd mention that Ace Bailey was going to score a million points for a team that stunk, which voters might enjoy.
Through one week of basketball, Flagg has been perhaps the fourth-most impressive rookie in the league, which has less to do with him than it does the state of the class of 2025. The rookies are going nuts.
We have to start with V.J. Edgecombe in Philadelphia. The third overall pick went for 14 points, six rebounds, and four assists in a win over the Wizards last night, which is a performance any player making his fourth career NBA start can be proud of. And yet it stands out here for how tame it was when compared to what he's done previously. Edgecombe began his career at a running start, dropping 14 points in the first quarter of his NBA career against the Celtics and winding up with 34 for the game. That's the most anyone's scored in their NBA debut since Wilt Chamberlain. He followed that up with 15 points and eight assists against Charlotte, then 26 points and seven assists against Orlando. He's played 161 minutes in his first three games, helped along by Jared McCain's thumb injury. He's also been an ideal sidekick for Tyrese Maxey, whose whole thing is running faster than anyone else all the time and shredding one-on-one coverages, which he has used to play off of Joel Embiid for years.
With Edgecombe, it's different. Whereas Embiid is profoundly stationary, Edgecombe is one of the best athletes in the NBA, and he gobbles up space left in Maxey's wake. He's incredible in advantage situations like transition and against mismatches, but he's also a smooth operator in the half court, as he showed in the big win against the Magic. It's one thing to vault into the sky for chase down blocks and jam big dunks against slowly rotating wings, but he was confidently creating and hitting tricky floaters and pull-up threes against good defenders. I watch him and I begin to think faintly heretical thoughts, e.g.: Is this what Dwyane Wade would have looked like with a jumper?, Are the Sixers the most fun team to watch in the East?, and Does it matter if Embiid is never healthy again? There's no point in thinking about any of that for too long, but one thing is for certain: Some brave, unwitting NBA veteran is going to be the victim of a crazy-style dunking-upon very soon.
The man picked one spot ahead of Edgecombe, Dylan Harper, is also getting immediate opportunity because of injuries and is playing a real role for a team with playoff aspirations. The Spurs traded for one athletically gifted left-handed point guard in February and drafted another a few months later, but with De'Aaron Fox out, Harper has been playing backup point guard for the undefeated Spurs and has flourished. The stats are good—roughly 15-5-5—but if you watch Harper move around, you see a player with uncommon instincts and control for a teenager. He never seems sped up, and he does the veteran point guard thing of getting a guy on his hip, slowing down to consolidate the advantage, and lathing out the space on offer until his team gets an easy shot. Harper is the best healthy passer on the Spurs, and having watched De'Aaron Fox for eight years, I'm confident Harper will be a more inventive, capable passer than his vet very soon.
Like Edgecombe, Harper is really fun to watch, though in a totally different way. Where Edgecombe is all violence and explosion, Harper is smooth. His best skill is his finishing around the basket, which he is so good at because he never panics. Just as watching Edgecombe burst through and around defenders is thrilling, so too is watching Harper control the speed of the game. Rookie ballhandlers don't tend to look this comfortable. Adjusting to the size and speed of the NBA is hard for anyone, especially around the rim, yet Harper is super confident at the cup.
The top three picks have been the most impressive rookies on the season, and while Flagg has not burst out of the starting gate the way Harper and Edgecombe did, I think it's worth pointing out that he's in a much more challenging developmental environment. He has been charged with playing point guard, a position where he has zero experience, for an extremely busted post-Luka Mavericks team that plays three other center-sized guys and a beyond-washed Klay Thompson. This will probably be good for his longterm development, and Flagg is a very good passer, but the one knock on his game was that he couldn't necessarily initiate offense like an every-play, No. 1 creator. Naturally, that's been his role, and he's had to contend with the gnarled spacing left for him by a concerningly immobile Anthony Davis and an offense otherwise populated with guys who can't dribble. He'll be fine, and he's struggled against the Spurs and Thunder, perhaps the two best defenses in the NBA.
Below the top of the lottery, there's been a lot to like. Tre Johnson looks like quite the scorer, Kon Knueppel knows where to stand, Derik Queen looks way better than he did in Summer League, and Collin Murray-Boyles just had an awesome game against the Spurs where he displayed the physicality that got him drafted ninth. Most intriguingly, mystery man Cedric Coward has excelled for the Grizzlies. Coward was the fastest, latest riser in the NBA draft, beginning the draft cycle off most everyone's board, making his way into second-round mocks around the time of the lottery, and winding up picked 11th.
You can see why David Thorpe made a case for drafting Coward second overall: he's athletic as hell and can shoot the leather off the ball. He made all six of his threes in an eye-popping win over Indiana, and currently boasts an ungodly and obviously unsustainable 86 true shooting percentage. Coward's shot is gorgeous: good balance, clean elevation, and a crisp wrist-flick. He gets up high and the ball seems to swish through the nets with a little extra snap to it. If he were just a 6-foot-6 shooter who knew how to cut and move around the perimeter, that would be great, but Coward has some real athletic pop to his game on both ends. Watching him against the Warriors on Monday was fun for how gleefully he threw himself at Steph Curry and Jimmy Butler over and over again.
It's so early that there's not much point in over-contextualizing these performances, figuring out where the rookies in question fit into long-term team-building strategies, or projecting ceilings. Mostly it is great fun to have a rookie class going out there and kicking ass so early.
