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Kon Knueppel on LaMelo Ball's personality: Kon Knueppel: "Yeah, he's loud, um, but he, he comes in every day and he says hello to everybody. Um, and I mean like trainer, strength coach, assistant coach, whoever's cooking the food in the, in the meal room. Um, so it's just cool to have people like that around."
Q. You played well with LaMelo Ball. You guys were kind of like branded as the you know the future of the Hornets. Was that a shock to you? Kon Knueppel: Yeah, definitely a shock. Melo’s a great dude. (…) He was great to be around every day. So that's already missed, you know, just the joy and energy that he brought to the locker room.
Mirin Fader: "One thing that's actually never discussed with LaMelo is how much the locker rooms love him. They love him. Like, every place I've seen him, Chino Hills, Lithuania, Australia, Charlotte, which I went to a practice, I went to a shootaround when I was doing a Kon Knueppel feature and you can see all the teammates gravitate towards him because the same things that people are dissing, his humor, his fun, his, you know, charisma are what they are attracted to."
Ball averaged 20.1 points, 7.1 assists and 4.8 rebounds last season. There are questions about his decision-making and the seriousness with which he takes the game, but the Wolves love his size, shot creation and playmaking. Maybe even more importantly, the Hornets were 11.6 points per 100 possessions better on offense with Ball on the floor last season, per Cleaning The Glass. Kon Knueppel, Charlotte’s terrific rookie, made 46 percent of his 3-pointers when Ball was on the court. That number dipped to 37 percent when he was off. Ball helped lead the Hornets to a 34-17 record after Jan. 1, a stretch in which they posted the No. 1-ranked offense and fifth-ranked defense. “We needed a guy like LaMelo to make everybody better,” one team source told The Athletic. “That was the thing that was missing.”
Sources say LaMelo Ball has been looking forward to this upcoming season with the team that drafted him No. 3 overall in 2020 to try to build off of Charlotte's momentum from 2025-26. The Hornets went a surprising 44-38 this season, only to fall at the final Play-In Tournament hurdle in Orlando and miss the playoffs for a league-high 10th consecutive season. We're told that the Hornets are nonetheless listening to the offers they're getting despite their recent success under second-year coach Charles Lee and could go ahead with a trade after the emergence of two players drafted after Ball — Rookie of the Year runner-up Kon Knueppel and Brandon Miller — as fellow franchise cornerstones.
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As Kon Knueppel listened to Jalen Brunson’s response, he thought about the times he’s watched him play with that exact demeanor in bigger moments, unafraid of the potential for a mistake. “He’s not afraid to be like, ‘I’m gonna go make a play. I’m gonna make an aggressive play. And if I make a mistake, it’s gonna be an aggressive mistake,’” Knueppel said. “He’s not afraid to lose,” Knueppel added. “And to win you can’t be afraid to lose.”
NBA Communications: The 2025-26 Kia NBA All-Rookie First Team: Cedric Coward, @memgrizz VJ Edgecombe, @sixers Cooper Flagg, @dallasmavs Dylan Harper, @spurs Kon Knueppel, @hornets
Kon Knueppel on Rookie of the Year award: “Obviously, I wanted to win it. If you would have told me at the beginning of the season that this is how my year would go, I would have taken it one hundred percent. “I went into the morning when they announced it thinking, ‘I can’t do anything about it now. I did all I could.’ I would have felt worse if I felt like I had left something out there, but I felt like I did all I could. “Maybe I wish I could have shot it better at the end of the season, but I was willing to live with the result. I felt like I had a really good season. I felt like I was deserving. I would have won it in a lot of different years, and I thought Cooper was also very deserving.”
Former Duke star Kon Knueppel continued his podcast tour this summer, making an appearance on the "Dale Jr. Download," hosted by none other than former two-time Daytona 500 winner Dale Earnhardt Jr. This comes not long after appearing on a podcast with Milwaukee Brewers star Christian Yelich. Earnhardt Jr. is the son of former racing icon Dale Earnhardt, who is tied with both Richard Petty and Jimmie Johnson for the most NASCAR championships (7) in the sport's history.
But here at TrueHoop, we just crunched decades of numbers, and discovered that the likelihood any team will draft a player, and have that player become an excellent NBA performer while still in the same uniform, is six percent. In other words, 94 percent of the picks in June’s draft are likely not to make your dreams come true, either because: * They’re not good enough, injured, under-nurtured, or similar; * Or by the time they’re highly productive, they’ve moved on to another team. We used Dunks and Threes data to assess that, and we set the bar high: at ten earned wins a season. That’s precisely where Kon Knueppel finished his rookie year. (It’s also about half of the production of a typical season’s best; this season, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander finished just below 20 Earned Wins.) But my guess is, it doesn’t much matter which numbers you use; you’d find similar results from almost any robust analysis.
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Did you feel that this year, in terms of the earning-the-stripes part? Even with guys on other teams — obviously, with your teammates, the more you’re with them, the more you’re going to bond with them — but with guys on other teams, did you feel like they started to treat you differently at all? Kon Knueppel: Like the exact point he made, I was just really not going to try to talk to guys. I was definitely not going to talk shit to guys. I was really just going to try to focus on what I’m doing. But I think as the season went on, those after-game “stay healthy, bro” type talks got a little more in-depth, which was cool. And then, obviously, the guys we talked about in your class — you’re going to have a little bit more of a bond with those guys. But I thought it was cool. Like you said, as the season went on, those conversations got a little more in-depth than just, “Good game.”
Knueppel helped the Hornets (44-38) finish with a winning record for just the second time in the past decade. Cooper Flagg’s Mavericks (26-56) finished in 12th place in the Western Conference. The Mavericks entered the season with high hopes but had to adjust their expectations after star big man Anthony Davis dealt with calf and hand injuries and was traded to the Washington Wizards in February. “Coming into this year, we all had different expectations in how we thought the year would go,” Flagg said. “But all of that is in the past. I think it’s time to move forward. Continue to grow, continue to get better and have a high outlook on how next year can go. We are just going to put in the work all summer long. I think we’re all excited for it.”
NBA Communications: The 2025-26 Kia NBA Rookie of the Year Award winner will be revealed tonight at 7 PM ET on Peacock and NBCSN. The three finalists: ▪️VJ Edgecombe, @sixers ▪️Cooper Flagg, @dallasmavs ▪️Kon Knueppel, @hornets
