DALLAS — Dusty May had friends in the NBA coaching community long before he chose to leave Michigan to become the Dallas Mavericks’ head coach last month.May has a relationship with Atlanta Hawks coach Quin Snyder dating to Snyder’s days in charge at Missouri from 1999 to 2006. May has also known Oklahoma City Thunder coach Mark Daigneault since Daigneault was an assistant at Florida from 2010 to 2014.One of the things May heard about life in the NBA was how rare it is to work with a player like Cooper Flagg.“A superstar who plays hard, who cares about his teammates, who is incredibly unselfish — those things aren’t that common, according to others,” May said Monday.Flagg was sitting about 50 feet away when May made those comments. The NBA’s reigning Rookie of the Year was one of a handful of Mavericks players who were visible on the team’s practice court to watch May meet with Dallas-area media for the first time.May explained that he first heard about Flagg when he was coaching at Florida Atlantic. Flagg was starting to make a name for himself as a high school prospect. Flagg spent a year at Nokomis Regional High in Maine and then two years at Montverde Academy in Florida. He was so good that ESPN rated him as the No. 1 player in the 2024 class, even though Flagg elected to reclassify and skip a year of high school entirely.May understood that it wasn’t realistic for him to attract a blue-chip prospect like Flagg to Florida Atlantic.“When you’re coaching at FAU, and guys like Cooper are playing in one gym, you go to another gym and find some other guys,” May said.