ESPN mistakes Ace Bailey, Dylan Harper for Cooper Flagg before NBA Draft

More than 25 years after Eminem’s single, “The Real Slim Shady,” was released, Elle Duncan and other people at ESPN might have been paraphrasing the song’s beginning in their heads.

Will the real Cooper Flagg please stand up? I repeat, will the real Cooper Flagg please stand up? We’re gonna have a problem here.

Duncan hosted Wednesday’s SportsCenter, leading into Wednesday night’s NBA Draft coverage. As part of the show, different NBA Draft prospects were shown on the red carpet. The angle they were shown at, which started from their feet and panned up, contributed to some of the problems.

“Welcome back to SportsCenter, you’re looking at Cooper Flagg,” Duncan said. “And in just over an hour from now…”

By this point, the camera was up to the lining of the player’s jacket, which notably included a Rutgers logo. Admittedly, that would be a weird thing for Flagg, a Duke product, to have in his jacket. Also visible were the player’s hands, holding the jacket open. Those hands clearly didn’t belong to Flagg, something Duncan noticed shortly thereafter.”

“That is not Cooper Flagg, at all, actually,” Duncan said. “That is quite famously Ace Bailey.”

The camera then shifted to another player, once again, starting from the feet and working its way up.

“There’s Coop…is that Coop…There’s Cooper Flag,” Duncan said.

This player also showed off the lining in his jacket. This time, there were no logos or photos, just red. Once again, though, the hands were visible. Once again, those hands quite clearly did not belong to Flagg.

“I was gonna say, a lot of. No. That’s not him either,” Duncan said upon seeing the face of Bailey’s Rutger’s teammate, Dylan Harper.

That is most certainly not Cooper Flagg. pic.twitter.com/zGUP0WChko

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) June 25, 2025

It looks like ESPN’s NBA coverage hasn’t missed a beat.