Is Kon Knueppel an Underrated Option at No. 3?
Everyone knows the last Duke guard pick worked out pretty well.
A lot of the big names in the 2025 NBA Draft have been at the top for quite a while.
Cooper Flagg’s NBA arrival has been awaited for nearly a half-decade. Guys like Ace Bailey and Dylan Harper were often put as the second and third prospects on the pedestal right behind him. VJ Edgecombe made a huge name for himself with his play in the 2024 Olympic Qualifying Tournament — on and on the list goes.
However, there’s one guy who might have entered the college season as a fringe first-round option in consensus public opinion who nonetheless very quickly emerged as one of the best prospects in the class, and that’s none other than Kon Knueppel.
The 6-foot-5 guard from Milwaukee averaged 14.4 points per game on 48-41-91 shooting splits for a Duke team that went 35-4 and was a final-minute collapse away from playing in the national championship and quite possibly winning it all. The hyper-efficient 64.2 TS% he posted is almost unheard of for a freshman guard, and unsurprisingly his shooting stroke is the first thing that’s mentioned when the option of drafting him comes up. Of the lottery-level prospects, he’s only rivaled by Tre Johnson for the title of best shooter.
However, unlike most prospects heralded for their shooting prowess, Knueppel is built like a tank and utilizes his strength constantly when he’s out on the floor. Any defender trying to stay in front of him is liable to get a shoulder bump to the chest knocking them out of his way. He uses his physicality and power to compensate for his lack of an elite first step, and while he’s not a terrible leaper, he does require a rather long load time to get off the floor and reach the apex of his jump, meaning he’s not usually soaring over defenders at the rim. Knueppel instead is a big fan of using up-fakes and crafty step-throughs to get people off balance and find openings in the paint. There might be no prospect in the class who plays with better patience and body positioning in a crowd than him.
Additionally, like his teammate Flagg, Knueppel accels at using his weak hand at the basket, an underrated important skill for a young basketball player to have. So many rookies enter the NBA and can be funneled toward a direction where they’re less comfortable. That will not be the case for Knueppel, who again has great touch to finish his left, and rarely gets knocked off his spot while going to his weak side thanks to his amazing strength.
Pointing even further toward Knueppel’s underlying star upside is that he’s not just an off-ball shooter and play finisher. Duke had multiple creators within their offense, and Knueppel was one of the primary pick and roll distributors on many occasions. He’s excellent at putting his defenders in jail behind him after using a ball screen, once again using his bulky build to his advantage, and his near 2:1 assist-to-turnover ratio shows how trustworthy he was a decision maker.
Knueppel rarely makes bad decisions while also not being afraid to attempt home run passes that lead to incredibly valuable shot opportunities for his teammates. Specifically, Knueppel shined as a lob passer to his teammate Khaman Maluach. His accuracy, touch, and anticipation to find the 7-foot-1 big rolling to the basket were all excellent, and the two connected very frequently throughout their 39-game season.
Though bigger, stronger body types like Knueppel don’t always profile as movement shooters, he showed plenty of comfort and willingness to let threes fire after catching them on the run, and to turn corners and attack when put in off-ball action. He’s a very fluid and adaptable offensive player who can scale up or scale down in on-ball usage as his team needs.
Though he won’t be sprinting and turning around corners at blinding speeds whenever he has a pindown set for him, he’s more than just a deadeye standstill shooter who has to continually spot up in the corner for threes. He’s a capable movement shooter with gravity that can bend a defense.
Of course, if Knueppel was a perfect prospect, it wouldn’t be a surprising move for the Sixers to take him with the third pick. While he is a very flexible player who can handle pick and rolls and primary playmaking responsibility from time to time, Knueppel is not the most dynamic self-creator in the world. His weakness with his first step and needed load time to get off the floor come into play here, as he can struggle to generate space when trying to get looks for himself off the dribble, particularly if he hasn’t managed to get his way to the rim where his footwork and strength can take over and finish the job.
Per Synergy, Knueppel shot 77-for-178 on catch-and-shoot threes this season, good for a blistering 43.1%. However, he in turn shot just 3-for-21 on off-the-dribble threes, which comes in at a paltry 14.3%, though he also shot an encouraging 16-for-37 on off-the-dribble two-point jumpers (43.2%).
He’s not one to catch a defender with a step back or get five feet of open space because of a deadly crossover. While most 19 year-old guards aren’t expected to be developed off-the-dribble scoring threats, this is the third overall pick, and it’s understandable to want more superstar equity when thinking of how to use that good of a pick.
Knueppel’s defensive tape at Duke was not bad and does not make him look like a huge liability, but he was also the fourth or fifth-best defender in the Blue Devils’ starting lineup depending on one’s opinion of Tyrese Proctor. His strength and height meant that he couldn’t be bullied inside by bigs who caught him on a switch, but his lacking footspeed did at times make him vulnerable against quick-twitch guards who could take him off the dribble and find space. Additionally, his wingspan measured in at just over 6-foot-6, barely eclipsing his height, and his lack of length does hurt his ability to contest shots by getting his outstretched hands in a shooter’s eyeline.
He won’t fall in the draft because he can’t be trusted on defense, but his defense also is far from the reason he’s been considered a top-ten if not top-five talent for the past few months.
Knueppel becomes such a tricky evaluation because of the context he’s coming out of, which is not one might expect from a Duke Blue Devil. Going purely off how they performed during their lone college seasons, it can be argued that the only top-tier freshman who was better than Knueppel was his own teammate in Flagg.
Harper and Bailey’s Rutgers team had a losing record, Edgecombe’s Baylor squad disappointed, and other highly touted freshmen gradually slid down the pecking order. Meanwhile, Knueppel spent the season being the second-best player on the No. 1 overall seed in the NCAA Tournament. He was an excellent player for an excellent team.
On the other hand, it’s hard to argue any other prospect was put in a more perfect situation than Knueppel. His teammates were the best freshman since Anthony Davis, the best lob threat in college basketball by a mile in Maluach, and two upperclassmen guards who could both ease the creation burden on Knueppel while also insulating his defensive shortcomings with their own stellar play. Though it would have looked much different in style, put any of Harper, Bailey, or Edgecombe in Knueppel’s spot for Duke, and their tape probably would have looked a lot more impressive.
But that’s also not entirely fair to Knueppel, who was partially responsible for creating that awesome environment he benefited from. He chose the right college to go to and performed well with the opportunity he was given.
When thinking about how he might translate to the NBA, it’s hard to envision Knueppel flat out failing on offense at the next level. The shooting, passing, and overall craft is good enough that he would need to be at the absolute bottom of the league in quickness and vertical to not have legit equity on that end of the floor. Not to mention he’s doing all this at a level of height and strength that could even let him occasionally play the 3 in the NBA in the right matchup.
The high floor of Knueppel seems easy to understand, but the ceiling is where the proposition is trickier. To reach a star-level outcome, he would either need to become a more consistent off-the-dribble shooter (particularly from behind the three-point line), or one has to believe so much in his passing out of the pick and roll game that he can leverage that into being the true focal point of a good NBA offense. It’s not impossible to see the vision, but it’s also far from a certainty.
For the Sixers specifically, Knueppel fits the theme that’s been tagged to each of the other prospects in this range — it would probably feel better to trade down and draft him in the 5-8 range than it would to just go ahead and pick him at No. 3. Not to mention, he’s similar to both Edgecombe and Johnson in that his height and skillset give him more positional overlap with Tyrese Maxey and Jared McCain than would be ideal. If he was the pick, it’s reasonable to bet on him being in the top seven or eight of the Sixers’ rotation next year and contributing well, but would he just top out as one of those seven while a guy picked after him becomes an All-Star?
The NBA Draft is far from a perfect science, and though Knueppel shouldn’t be the runaway favorite for the third overall pick, he is more than deserving for consideration at the spot.
Daniel Olinger is a writer for the Rights To Ricky Sanchez, and author of “The Danny” column, even though he refuses to be called that in person. He can be followed on X @dan_olinger.
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Ahh, Nik Stauskas 2.0! Sauce K'ppello!