Sunday night was a reunion of sorts for Cooper Flagg and Donovan Clingan.
Long before Flagg and Clingan were facing off against each other in the NBA for the Dallas Mavericks and Portland Trail Blazers, their moms were teammates on the University of Maine women’s basketball team.
Stacey Porrini Clingan and Kelly Bowman Flagg overlapped in Orono as players for the Black Bears, and that family connection added another milestone on Sunday night when the Mavericks beat the Trail Blazers in overtime. It was the first time that Cooper Flagg and Donovan Clingan faced off against each other in the NBA, decades after their mothers shared the court for UMaine.
Porrini Clingan was a two-time all-conference player and helped lead UMaine to its first three NCAA tournament appearances in the 1990s. Standing 6-foot-4, she was a difference maker in the paint for the Black Bears.
She died in 2018 after a long bout with breast cancer at the age of 42, and was posthumously inducted into the UMaine Sports Hall of Fame in 2023.
Kelly Flagg, then Kelly Bowman, was a few years behind Porrini Clingan at UMaine. Flagg was a member of the first and only UMaine team to win an NCAA tournament game in 1998-99.
“Stacey was an amazing role model for me during my time at UMaine,” Kelly Flagg wrote on Facebook in 2023, as reported by CT Insider in Connecticut. “She was a great competitor and an awesome teammate.”
The Flaggs were visiting the University of Connecticut at the time, where Donovan Clingan had already won a national championship with the Huskies and would go on to win another. Cooper Flagg was considering UConn as a potential college destination, and he and Clingan had a photo shoot together wearing their moms’ UMaine jerseys.
“It was a special moment,” Kelly Flagg added in her Facebook post at the time.
In that photo, Clingan is wearing his mom’s number 32 and Cooper Flagg is wearing his mom’s number 11. Though Kelly Flagg’s number in high school was also 32, that wasn’t available when she arrived at UMaine, so she wore number 11 (which her son Ace Flagg now wears in his freshman season at UMaine).
Thirty-two went on to be Cooper Flagg’s number in high school and now in the NBA. He explained the significance of that number on a podcast in 2024.
“My mom had worn [No. 32] in high school and then her teammate in college, Donovan Clingan’s mom, had also worn it, and she had passed away,” Cooper Flagg explained last year, as reported by CBS News. “So I think I started wearing it because [my mom] wore it originally. Then having learned that story and hearing that, it gave me more of a reason to want to wear it. Just having that reason of my mom’s teammate and wearing that number, it kind of just made me feel good about it. I just fell in love with the number.”
Flagg was wearing number 32 again on Sunday night, when he and Clingan met on the NBA court for the first time. Clingan wears number 23 for Portland.
The two shared a quick moment together in warmups, which was captured and posted by the Trail Blazers on social media.
Flagg proceeded to have one of his best games as a pro, scoring 21 points and grabbing eight rebounds while providing five assists. He made several key plays for the Mavericks down the stretch in the 138-133 win over Portland, and recognized when the Trail Blazers took their center Clingan out of the game at a pivotal point.
“They played a lot of the end of the game with their center on the bench, Donovan Clingan on the bench,” Flagg said after the win, as reported by the Athletic. “If they are not going to have shot blocking in the game, we [have] to use our size.”
The 7-foot-2 Clingan is in his second season after being taken seventh overall in last year’s NBA draft. Flagg was the overall first pick in this year’s draft.
