Paul Pierce gave an interesting perspective while talking to KG. He asked KG what his position was when he came in, and KG said the 5. Then he asked what he was forced to play, and KG said the 3. Paul Pierce asked if that made him a better player, and KG said yes. His point was, Cooper will see the game differently being pushed out of his comfort zone playing the point, and it'll make him better overall.
There's a couple problems with this -
The first of which, being the lead ball-handler is toughest position to acclimatize to, especially if you have little-to-no experience playing the 1 coming into the league. It's
a lot different to someone like KG, whose role wasn't that drastically different playing 3-5; he wasn't asked to bring the ball up, he wasn't asked to create for others, he wasn't asked to run the PnR.
He was just asked to finish plays.
Flagg is being asked to create for himself and for others, when ideally, he should be put in a postion where he's just finishing plays (like KG was). Once he gets his feet wet and adjusts to the pace of the league, then you can start giving him more ball-handling duties.
The other issue is, there's clearly some disconnect between what Nico thinks/wants and what Kidd is doing. Nico wants us to believe trading Luka was going to put the team in a better position of contending, but here we have an 18-year-old been thrown in at the deep end at PG. The timeline(s) in which this team is operating at clearly aren't lining up. I don't even hate the PG experiment, it just doesn't make sense to me with what the Mavs are doing.
You'd put Flagg at PG this early if you're rebuilding, not when you're supposed to be contending for a chip this season.