Duke

LONDON — Prince Andrew said Friday he is giving up his royal title of the Duke of York and other honors after his friendship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein returned to the headlines.

Andrew, the younger brother to King Charles III, said in a statement released by Buckingham Palace that “the continued accusations about me distract from the work of His Majesty and the royal family.”

“With His Majesty’s agreement, we feel I must now go a step further. I will therefore no longer use my title or the honours which have been conferred upon me,” Andrew said in his statement Friday. “As I have said previously, I vigorously deny the accusations against me.”

The news came in the wake of the release of excerpts of an upcoming posthumous memoir from Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who has alleged she was trafficked by Epstein and had sex with Andrew when she was 17.

It’s the latest fall from grace for the 65-year-old prince, who had already stepped down from public life in 2019 over his links to Epstein despite his denials of any wrongdoing.

Giuffre died by suicide in April at the age of 41. In the memoir, she details alleged encounters with Prince Andrew, who she sued in 2021, claiming that they had sex when she was 17. Andrew denied her claims and said he didn’t recall having met her.

Andrew, once second in line to the British throne, has long been a source of tabloid fodder because of his links to Epstein, other questionable characters and money woes.

His attempt to refute Giuffre’s allegations backfired during a November 2019 BBC interview. Viewers saw a prince who proffered curious rebuttals — such as disputing Giuffre’s recollection of sweaty dancing by saying he was medically incapable of perspiring — and showed no empathy for the women who said Epstein abused them.

Within days of the interview, Andrew stepped down from his royal duties. Giuffre sued him and the case was settled in 2022 for an undisclosed sum. A statement filed in court said that the prince acknowledged Epstein was a sex trafficker and Giuffre was “an established victim of abuse.”

As well as no longer using the title of the Duke of York, a long-established title that was gifted to him by his mother Queen Elizabeth II at his wedding to Sarah Ferguson in 1986, Andrew will also give up other titles: Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order and Royal Knight Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter. He will remain a prince, which he has been entitled to since birth.

Andrew’s ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson will also no longer use the title of Duchess of York. Their children, Beatrice and Eugenie, will remain princesses.

Andrew’s chaotic marriage to Ferguson, widely known as Fergie, lasted a decade though the two remain close, living together at a 30-room mansion near Windsor Castle. He has long been criticized for his opulent, globe-trotting lifestyle.

Andrew had been the poster boy of the royal family for many years, and his romantic links to a number of models and starlets during his youth were widely chronicled in the British press.

His star status within the royal family was at its peak after he flew in multiple missions as a helicopter pilot in the Royal Navy during the 1982 Falklands War when British forces sailed to the south Atlantic to eject the Argentine military that had invaded the U.K. overseas territories.

Lawless and Pylas write for the Associated Press.

First-year girls’ basketball coach Will Burr of Harvard-Westlake High has already concluded more than a month before the season begins that 6-foot-2 freshman Lucia Khamenia is going to be an impact player.

She’s the sister of former Harvard-Westlake All-American Nikolas Khamenia, who is now a freshman at Duke.

Burr said Khamenia can play different positions because of her size and versatility, go inside or make threes like her brother.

She’s not the only high-profiled freshman on the Wolverines’ roster. Valentino Collins is the daughter of former Harvard-Westlake and NBA player Jarron Collins. Her sister, Alessandra, is a junior for the Wolverines.

Senior Valentina Guerrero will lead a young Wolverines team.

Burr is a highly regarded coach, having guided Oak Park to three straight Southern Section titles after winning one at Viewpoint.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email [email protected].

Aug. 29 (UPI) — Randy “Duke” Cunningham, a decorated Vietnam War pilot and U.S. House member convicted of corruption, has died. He was 83.

Cunningham, the inspiration fo Tom Cruise‘s character Maverick in the film Top Gun, died Wednesday at a hospital in Little Rock, Ark., after an illness, the San Diego Union reported.

He represented the San Diego area in Congress for 15 years until 1990,

In 2005, Cunningham pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges and spent 8 1/2 years in prison, mostly at a minimum-security work camp in Tucson, Ariz. He admitted to accepting $2.4 million in illegal gifts from defense contractors in exchange for government contracts and other favors.

“The truth is, I broke the law, concealed my conduct and disgraced my office,” Cunningham told reporters in a tearful downtown San Diego news conference on the day he pleaded guilty. “I know that I will forfeit my freedom, my reputation, my worldly possessions and, most importantly, the trust of my friends and family. … In my life I have had great joy and great sorrow. And now I know great shame.”

Two defense contractors were sentenced in 2008 for bribery.

Brent Wilkes was sentencted to 12 years in prison for giving money, prostitutes and other bribes in exchange for securing $90 million in Pentagon work for his document scanning company.

Mitchell Wade was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison for bribing Cunningham with more than $1 million in gifts, including cash, home furnishings, a Rolls-Royce and an antique commode.

It was considered the largest bribery scandal in congression history.

He was released from prison in 2013 and went to a halfway house in New Orleans.

Cunningam moved to nearby Little Rock.

On the day President Donald Trump left office on Jan. 20, 2021, he pardoned Cunningham, noting he tutored inmates while in prison and volunteered for a local fire department. The pardon forgives the offense and restores civil rights, including the right to vote or hold public office.

Former Rep. Duncan Hunter Sr. visited his former colleague just last week.

“Duke was a wonderful guy, and he was a wonderful friend,” Hunter said .”His legacy is as one of the great fighter pilots of his era, but Duke’s more special than that. He was flying off the Constellation on a daily basis even when the politicians had given up on the Vietnam War.”

The Aviation National Geek Club reported he had been in and out of a hospital for eight months with heart problems.

Cunningham, who shared a nickname with the Hollywood icon John Wayne, was born in Los Angeles on Dec. 8, 1941, one day after Japanese fighters attacked Pearl Harbor.

After his family moved to Missouri, he attended the University of Missouri, earning degrees in education and physical education.

In 1967, he joined the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War.

He earned the Navy Cross and two Silver Stars. He flew F4 Panthom jets.

“With complete disregard for his own personal safety, he continued his attack through a hail of cannon fire to rescue his wingman,” the citation for one of his Silver Stars read.

“We flew 170 combat missions together and we were in some pretty harrowing situations,” Willy Driscoll, the only other naval aviator to earn ace designation during the Vietnam era, said. “Randy was the consummate professional as an aviator, constantly working to improve his knowledge of fighter tactics and committed to excellence in the air at all times.”

He rose to the rank of commander before retiring in 1967.

Cunningham became a political commentator on national television.

He decided to run against House Democrat Jim Bates, who was accused of sexual harassment.

In the left-learning 44th District, he promised to be a “congressman we can be proud of.” He won the race by 1 percentage point in 1990.

Cunningham lived on a boat on the Potomac River — “The Duke-Stir” — that was owned by a defense contractor.

He became chairman of a subcommittee that put him in control of billions of dollars in defense spending.

The San Diego Union reported a defense contractor had purchased Cunningham’s home for $1.7 million, which was several hundred thousand dollars above comparable homes.

The newspaper then reported he also accepted millions of dollars in bribes. The Union-Tribune and its news organization, Copley News Service, were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.

“Probably the legacy he leaves is a reminder that the public square and public office can be very corrupting,” Marcus Stern, one of the reporters who broke the stories on Cunningham, said. “You go to Washington as a congressperson, and everything can become very tempting. He succumbed to it – but a lot of other people have as well.”

July 29 (UPI) — The Department of Education has launched a civil rights investigation into Duke University amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on higher-learning institutions as it seeks to rid the private and public sector of diversity, equity and inclusion policies.

The civil rights investigation was launched Monday into not only Duke but its law journal for violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by allegedly discriminating against students based on race.

The investigation coincides with the departments of Education and Health and Human Services sending a joint letter to Duke University outlining their “shared concerns” about its use of race in its hiring, admissions and scholarship decisions.

“If Duke illegally gives preferential treatment to law journal or medical school applicants based on those students’ immutable characteristics, that is an affront not only to civil rights law, but to the meritocratic character of academic excellence,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement.

“Blatantly discriminatory practices that are illegal under the Constitution, anti-discrimination law and Supreme Court precedent have become all too common in our education institutions. The Trump administration will not allow them to continue.”

Diversity, equity and inclusion, known as DEI, is a conceptual framework that promotes fair treatment and full participation of all people. It has been a target of conservatives who claim it focuses on race and gender at the expense of merit.

Since returning to the White House in January, President Donald Trump has sought to remove DEI from the federal government and has threatened to revoke federal funding from several universities, including Harvard, over their alleged DEI programs.

Dozens of schools have been the target of Trump administration civil rights investigations over DEI policies and practices. It has also launched investigations into schools over allowing transgender students to compete in women’s sporting competitions, for not protecting Jewish students amid pro-Palestine protests and for providing migrants with scholarship opportunities denied to out-of-state Americans.

Several of the schools have reached multimillion-dollar settlements with the Trump administration to resolve the civil rights investigations, including Columbia, which, earlier this month, agreed to pay $200 million to the federal government and end its DEI policies.

The investigation launched Monday accuses Duke’s law review of awarding extra points in its editor application process to personal statements that explain how the applicant’s membership in an underrepresented group promotes diverse voices.

In the joint letter from the Department of Education and HHS, they accuse Duke University School of Medicine of employing practices that “include illegal and wrongful racial preferences and discriminatory activity in recruitment, student admissions, scholarships and financial aid, mentoring and enrichment programs, hiring, promotion and more.”

No specifics were given.

“The immediate request is simple: Review all policies and practices at Duke Health for the illegal use of race preferences, take immediate action to reform all of those that unlawfully take account of race or ethnicity to bestow benefits or advantages and provide clear and verifiable assurances to the government that Duke’s new policies will be implemented faithfully going forward,” the letter said.

The departments called on the school to form a committee to carry out the Trump administration’s request over a six-month period. Duke has 10 days to respond, it said.

The departments said federal funding to the school was at risk.

Ari Aster’s “Eddington” is such a superb social satire about contemporary America that I want to bury it in the desert for 20 years. More distance will make it easier to laugh.

It’s a modern western set in New Mexico — Aster’s home state — where trash blows like tumbleweeds as Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) stalks across the street to confront Eddington’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), whom he is campaigning to unseat. It’s May of 2020, that hot and twitchy early stretch of the COVID pandemic when reality seemed to disintegrate, and Joe is ticked off about the new mask mandate. He has asthma, and he can’t understand anyone who has their mouth covered.

Joe and Ted have old bad blood between them that’s flowed down from Joe’s fragile wife Louise, a.k.a. Rabbit (Emma Stone), a stunted woman-child who stubbornly paints creepy dolls, and his mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), a raving conspiracist who believes the Titanic sinking was no accident. Dawn is jazzed to decode the cause of this global shutdown; there’s comfort in believing everything happens for a reason. Her mania proves contagious.

Bad things are happening in Eddington and have been for decades, not just broken shop windows. Joe wears a white hat and clearly considers himself the story’s hero, although he’s not up to the job. If you squint real hard, you can see his perspective that he’s a champion for the underdog. Joe gets his guts in a twist when a maskless elder is kicked out of the local grocery store as the other shoppers applaud. “Public shaming,” Joe spits.

“There’s no COVID in Eddington,” Joe claims in his candidacy announcement video, urging his fellow citizens that “we need to free our hearts.” His earnestness is comic and sweet and dangerous. You can hear every fact he’s leaving out. His rival’s commercials promote a fantastical utopia where Ted is playing piano on the sidewalk and elbow-bumping more Black people in 15 seconds than we see in the rest of the movie. Ted also swears that permitting a tech behemoth named SolidGoldMagikarp to build a controversial giant data center on the outskirts of the county won’t suck precious resources — it’ll transform this nowheresville into a hub for jobs. Elections are a measure of public opinion: Which fibber would you trust?

Danger is coming and like in “High Noon,” this uneasy town will tear itself apart before it arrives. Aster is so good at scrupulously capturing the tiny, fearful COVID behaviors we’ve done our best to forget that it’s a shame (and a relief) that the script isn’t really about the epidemic. Another disease has infected Eddington: Social media has made everyone brain sick.

The film is teeming with viral headlines — serious, frivolous or false — jumbled together on computer screens screaming for attention in the same all-caps font. (Remember the collective decision that no one had the bandwidth to care about murder hornets?) Influencers and phonies and maybe even the occasional real journalist prattle on in the backgrounds of scenes telling people what to think and do, often making things worse. Joe loves his wife dearly. We see him privately watching a YouTuber explain how he can convince droopy Louise to have children. Alas, he spends his nights in their marital bed chastely doomscrolling.

Every character in “Eddington” is lonely and looking for connection. One person’s humiliating nadir comes during a painful tracking shot at an outdoor party where they’re shunned like they have the plague. Phones dominate their interactions: The camera is always there in somebody’s hand, live streaming or recording, flattening life into a reality show and every conversation into a performance.

The script expands to include Joe’s deputies, aggro Guy (Luke Grimes) and Bitcoin-obsessed Michael (Micheal Ward), plus a cop from the neighboring tribal reservation, Officer Butterfly Jimenez (William Belleau) and a handful of bored, identity-seeking teens. They’ll all wind up at odds even though they’re united by the shared need to be correct, to have purpose, to belong. When George Floyd is killed six states away, these young do-gooders rush into the streets, excited to have a reason to get together and yell. The protesters aren’t insincere about the cause. But it’s head-scrambling to watch blonde Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle) lecture her ex-boyfriend Michael, who is Black and a cop, about how he should feel. Meanwhile Brian (Cameron Mann), who is white and one of the most fascinating characters to track, is so desperate for Sarah’s attention that he delivers a hilarious slogan-addled meltdown: “My job is to sit down and listen! As soon as I finish this speech! Which I have no right to make!”

The words come fast and furious and flummoxing. Aster has crowded more pointed zingers and visual gags into each scene than our eyes can take in. His dialogue is laden with vile innuendos — “deep state,” “sexual predator,” “antifa” — and can feel like getting pummeled. When a smooth-talking guru named Vernon (Austin Butler) slithers into the plot, he regales Joe’s family with an incredulous tale of persecution that, as he admits, “sounds insane just to hear coming out of my mouth.” Well, yeah. Aster wants us to feel exhausted sorting fact from fiction.

The verbal barrage builds to a scene in which Joe and Dawn sputter nonsense at each other in a cross-talking non-conversation where both sound like they’re high on cocaine. They are, quite literally, internet junkies.

This is the bleakest of black humor. There’s even an actual dumpster fire. Aster’s breakout debut, “Hereditary,” gave him an overnight pedigree as the princeling of highbrow horror films about trauma. But really, he’s a cringe comedian who exaggerates his anxieties like a tragic clown. Even in “Midsommar,” Aster’s most coherent film, his star Florence Pugh doesn’t merely cry — she howls like she could swallow the earth. It wouldn’t be surprising to hear that when Aster catches himself getting maudlin, he forces himself to actively wallow in self-pity until it feels like a joke. Making the tragic ridiculous is a useful tool. (I once got through a breakup by watching “The Notebook” on repeat.)

With “Beau Is Afraid,” Aster’s previous film with Phoenix, focusing that approach on one man felt too punishing. “Eddington” is hysterical group therapy. I suspect that Aster knows that if we read a news article about a guy like Joe, we wouldn’t have any sympathy for him at all. Instead, Aster essentially handcuffs us to Joe’s point of view and sends us off on this tangled and bitterly funny adventure, in which rattling snakes spice up a humming, whining score by the Haxan Cloak and Daniel Pemberton.

Not every plot twist works. Joe’s sharpest pivot is so inward and incomprehensible that the film feels compelled to signpost it by having a passing driver yell, “You’re going the wrong way!” By the toxic finale, we’re certain only that Phoenix plays pathetic better than anyone these days. From “Her” to “Joker” to “Napoleon” to “Inherent Vice,” he’s constantly finding new wrinkles in his sad sacks. “Eddington’s” design teams have taken care to fill Joe’s home with dreary clutter and outfit him in sagging jeans. By contrast, Pascal’s wealthier Ted is the strutting embodiment of cowboy chic. He’s even selfishly hoarded toilet paper in his fancy adobe estate.

It’s humanistic when “Eddington” notes that everyone in town is a bit of a sinner. The problem is that they’re all eager to throw stones and point out what the others are doing wrong to get a quick fix of moral superiority. So many yellow cards get stacked up against everyone that you come to accept that we’re all flawed, but most of us are doing our best.

Joe isn’t going to make Eddington great again. He never has a handle on any of the conspiracies, and when he grabs a machine gun, he’s got no aim. Aster’s feistiest move is that he refuses to reveal the truth. When you step back at the end to take in the full landscape, you can put most of the story together. (Watch “Eddington” once, talk it out over margaritas and then watch it again.) Aster makes the viewer say their theories out loud afterwards, and when you do, you sound just as unhinged as everyone else in the movie. I dig that kind of culpability: a film that doesn’t point sanctimonious fingers but insists we’re all to blame.

But there are winners and losers and winners who feel like losers and schemers who get away with their misdeeds scot-free. Five years after the events of this movie, we’re still standing in the ashes of the aggrieved. But at least if we’re cackling at ourselves together in the theater, we’re less alone.

Alan Tudyk was nearly 50 when he scored his first starring role in a TV series as the titular extraterrestrial Harry Vanderspeigle in Syfy’s “Resident Alien.” It’s not that he was underemployed or little known — he’s been celebrated in genre circles since “Firefly,” the 2002 single-season western-themed space opera in which he played the sweet, comical pilot of a spaceship captained by smuggler Mal, played by Nathan Fillion, with whom he has since been linked in the interested public mind, like Hope and Crosby, or Fey and Poehler. His own 2015 web series “Con Man” (currently available on Prime Video), based on his experiences at sci-fi conventions, in which he and Fillion play inverted versions of themselves, was funded by an enormously successful crowd-sourced campaign, which raised $3,156,178 from 46,992 backers; clearly the people love him.

You can’t exactly call “Resident Alien” career-making, given how much Tudyk has worked, going back to onscreen roles in the late 20th century and on stage in New York, but it has made him especially visible over a long period in a marvelous show in a part for which he seems to have been fashioned. He has, indeed, often been invisible, with a parallel career as a voice artist, beginning with small parts in “Ice Age” in 2002; since channeling Ed Wynn for King Candy in Disney’s 2012 “Wreck-It Ralph” (which won him an Annie Award), the studio has used him regularly, like a good luck charm. You can hear him in “Frozen” (Duke of Weselton), “Big Hero 6” (Alistair Krei), “Zootopia” (Duke Weaselton), “Moana” (Hei Hei), “Encanto” (Pico) and “Wish” (Valentino). He played the Joker on “Harley Quinn” and voices Optimus Prime in “Transformers: EarthSpark.” Performing motion capture and voice-over, he was Sonny the emotional android in “I, Robot” and the dry droid K-2SO in both “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” and again in “Andor.” (He’s a robot again in the new “Superman” film.) This is a partial, one could even say fractional, list. Among animation and sci-fi fans, being the well-informed sorts they are, Tudyk is known and honored for this body of work as well.

Alan Tudyk at his home in Los Angeles last year. The actor has been in a variety of roles onscreen, on stage and as a voice actor.

(Ethan Benavidez / For The Times)

“Resident Alien,” whose fourth season is underway on Syfy, USA and Peacock (earlier seasons are available on Netflix, which has raised the show’s profile considerably), is a small town comedy with apocalyptic overtones. It sees Tudyk’s alien, whose natural form is of a giant, big-eyed, noseless humanoid with octopus DNA, imperfectly disguised as the new local doctor, whom he kills in the first episode. (We will learn that the doctor was, in fact, an assassin, which makes it sort of … all right?) Learning English from reruns of “Law & Order,” the being now called Harry will preposterously succeed in his masquerade, and in doing so, join a community that will ultimately improve him. (By local standards, at least.) It’s a fish way, way out of water story, with the difference that the fish has been sent to kill all the Earth fish — I am being metaphorical, he isn’t actually out to kill fish — although he is now working to save them from a different, nastier race of alien.

Some actors play their first part and suddenly their name is everywhere; others slide into public consciousness slowly, through a side door — which may lead, after all, to a longer, more varied career. Tudyk has the quality of having arrived, despite having been there all along. Like many actors with a long CV, he might surprise you, turning up on old episodes of “Strangers With Candy,” “Frasier,” “Arrested Development” or “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” or repeatedly crying “Cramped!” in a scene from “Patch Adams,” or in the movies “Wonder Boys,” “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Tale” or “3:10 to Yuma.” You might say to yourself, or the person you’re watching with, “Hey, that’s Alan Tudyk.” (You might add, “He hasn’t aged a bit.”) It was “Suburgatory,” an underloved ABC sitcom from 2011, though not underloved by me, where he played the confused best friend of star Jeremy Sisto, that, combined with “Firefly,” cemented Tudyk in my mind as someone I would always be happy to see.

He’s handsome in a pleasant, ordinary way. If he’s not exactly Hollywood’s idea of a leading man, it only points up the limitations of that concept. His eyes are maybe a trifle close set, his lips a little thin. There’s a softness to him that feeds into or productively contrasts with his characters, depending on where they fall on the good-bad or calm-hysterical scales. (In the current season of “Resident Alien,” a shape-shifting giant praying mantis has taken over Harry’s human identity, and this evil twin performance, which somehow fools Harry’s friends, is as frightening as the fact that the mantis eats people’s heads.) It makes his robots relatable and roots his more flamboyant characters, like Mr. Nowhere, the villain in the first season of “Doom Patrol” — who comments on the series from outside the fourth wall, inhabiting a white void where he might be discovered sitting on a toilet and reading a review of the show he’s in — in something like naturalism.

Sara Tomko and Alan Tudyk in a scene from Season 4 of “Resident Alien.”

(USA Network / James Dittiger / USA Network)

As Harry, Tudyk is never really calm. Relaxed neither in voice nor body, he tucks his lips inside his mouth and stretches it into a variety of blobby shapes. The actor can seem to be puppeteering his own expressions, which, in a way Harry is, or splitting the difference between a real person and an animated cartoon, in the Chuck Jones/Tex Avery sense of the term, which is not to say Tudyk overplays; he just hits the right note of exaggeration. Harry often has the air of being impatient to leave a scene and get on with whatever business he’s decided is important.

Though he’s given to explosive bursts of speech, as the character has developed, the humor he plays becomes more subtle and quiet, peppered with muttered comments and sotto voce asides he means to be heard. He is, as he likes to point out, the smartest and most powerful being around, but he has the emotional maturity of a child. At one point, having lost his alien powers, Harry was willing to sacrifice the entirety of his species to get them back.

Where once he had no emotions, now he is full of them. Last season, he was given a romance, with Heather (Edi Patterson), a bird person from outer space, which has continued into the current run; he is also a father, with a great affection — anomalous in his species — for his son, Bridget, an adorably fearsome little green creature. And he loves pie.

And that Tudyk himself seems genuinely nice — there are interviews with him up and down YouTube, and my friend David, who worked on “Firefly,” called him “kind, grateful and curious” — makes him easy to like, however likable a person he’s playing. That possibly shouldn’t matter when assessing an actor’s art, but it does anyway.

Some three hours before the Clippers used the 30th and final pick in the first round of the NBA draft to select Penn State’s Yanic Konan Niederhauser, the two top choices went as predicted and then the rest of the order was all over the place Wednesday.

In Konan Niederhauser, the Clippers got a 7-foot center and that was one of the positions they needed help to back up starter Ivica Zubac.

“We always go into the draft board looking for the best available player, and it also coincides this time with a need,” said Lawrence Frank, the Clippers president of basketball operations. “We’ve kind of looked over the years for a center that complements Zu, that does something different than Zu does. Sometimes it’s resulted with guys being undersized where we haven’t been able to maximize it. Yanic has legit positional size and I think the rim-rolling threat, combined with what Zu’s play is, I think in due time will be really, really good.”

As expected, Duke’s talented Cooper Flagg was taken first overall by the Dallas Mavericks. Rutgers’ Dylan Harper, the son of former NBA star and former Laker Ron Harper, was taken second by the San Antonio Spurs.

The rest of the lottery started to take shape with a change, when Baylor’s VJ Edgecombe was taken third by the 76ers.

Duke’s Kon Knueppel went fourth to Charlotte; Rutgers’ Ace Bailey went fifth to the Jazz; Texas’ Tre Johnson went sixth to the Wizards; Oklahoma’s Jeremiah Fears went seventh to the Pelicans; BYU’s Egor Demin went eighth to the Nets; South Carolina’s Collin Murray-Boyles went ninth to the Raptors; Duke’s Khaman Maluach went 10th to the Rockets (but he was traded to the Suns); Washington State’s Cedric Coward was taken 11th by the Trail Blazers (he was traded to the Grizzlies; France’s Noa Esse went 12th to the Bulls, Maryland’s Derik Queen went 13th to the Hawks (he was traded to the Pelicans); and Arizona’s Carter Bryant was taken 14th by the Spurs.

Flagg was at the top of his draft class, a player the Mavericks really needed to take after trading fan favorite Luka Doncic to the Lakers last season, a trade that upset many of Dallas’ fans.

But they now get Flagg, who averaged 19.4 points, 7.5 rebounds and 4.2 assists in his only season with the Blue Devils.

Konan Niederhauser, 22, who grew up in Switzerland, has been dealing with an ankle injury the Clippers don’t think will be a problem.

He averaged 12.9 points and 6.3 rebounds last season at Penn State.

“I think the reason we decided with Yanic is that he’s got great positional size,” Frank said. “He also has some definite traits in the short term that will carry over, like his ability to run the floor, his ability to play behind the defense in the dunker spot, his ability to play screen-and-roll and be a vertical threat. Those are things that will carry over pretty much on day one.”

The Clippers are a veteran-laden team led by Kawhi Leonard and James Harden, and because of that, Coach Tyronn Lue said any young player they take should follow their lead.

“I think the biggest thing is, coming into the draft, if you’re not a Cooper Flagg, a one, two or three pick, you got to find your way, find your niche to get on the floor,” Lue told a group of fans at the team’s draft watch party at Intuit Dome on Wednesday. “Playing without the basketball, because when you come to this team, or any other team, with Kawhi Leonards, James Hardens on the floor, you’re not going to [get a lot of time]. You have to learn how to play the game and make your teammates better and things like that. And then the most important thing is your attitude.”

When the NBA draft continues Thursday with the second round, the Clippers will pick 51st.

The Lakers didn’t have a first-round pick, but they have a second-round pick at No. 55.

For the Clippers, they have a few things to get worked out.

Harden, who averaged 22.8 points per game, 8.7 assists and 5.8 rebounds and was third-team All-NBA, has a player option for $36.3 million and he has to inform the Clippers of his decision by Sunday.

The consensus around the NBA is that Harden will opt out and seek a two-year extension from the Clippers.

Nicolas Batum has a player option for next season that pays him $4.9 million and he has to let the team know by Sunday of his decision. Norman Powell has one more year on his deal that pays him $20.4 million next season and he also is looking for an extension.