Kon Knueppel says his biggest rookie-year lesson was learning how to manage his body, sleep and travel over the grind of an NBA season.
The biggest lesson of Kon Knueppel's rookie season was about getting his body through it, more than anything he did with the ball, the Charlotte Hornets wing said during Monday's media day.
That season started 4-13. After a loss at Atlanta on Nov. 23, 2025, Charlotte had dropped six straight, while Knueppel averaged 23.1 points over his previous 10 games. Charlotte won 40 of its final 65.
A right ankle sprain at Orlando on Dec. 26 cost him one game, a Dec. 29 home loss to the Milwaukee Bucks, and he was back on New Year's Eve.
In February, he played the Rising Stars game on a Friday night in Los Angeles and entered both the Shooting Stars event and the 3-Point Contest the next evening. He played through a minor back issue in March. On March 6 against Miami, according to the Hornets, he passed Michael Jordan for the most games by a rookie with at least 20 points on 65% true shooting.
The Hornets finished 44-38, their best record since 2015-16, and went into the play-in tournament as the Eastern Conference's ninth seed. Across Charlotte's two play-in games, Knueppel scored 17 points combined and shot 1-of-12 from 3-point range.
Knueppel Learned How to Manage an NBA Season
Most of the adjustment, for him, came away from the court, in diet, sleep, and travel.
"I think the biggest thing is just the length of the season," Knueppel said. "A lot of it doesn't really come down to necessarily skills on the court, but just having your body ready to go. You've got to work your way up into things, making sure you're taking care of your diet, taking care of your sleep, adjusting to the travel. I think that I'll just settle into that a little bit more, which is good."
"And I think that's probably the biggest thing going forward because I want to keep myself fresh for the parts of the season that really mean something," Knueppel added. "At the end of the season, I want to play better than I did last year. And so how can I put myself in a position to be feeling the best I can towards the end of the year?"
He logged 2,551 minutes across 81 games, at 31.5 per night. The season before, he played all 39 of Duke's games, a run that ended in the Final Four on April 5, 2025. The Hornets drafted him in June, he played Summer League in July, and training camp opened that fall.
Back-to-Back Games Required Another Adjustment
Back-to-backs and two-day breaks each ask something different of a body, by his account. Now that Knueppel has experienced the NBA calendar once, he believes he will be better prepared for those situations.
"I think it's a grind," Knueppel explained. "Anybody that's going through it knows that it's tough just with the travel, with the habits, the sleep, because your schedule is so different day to day. There's no, like, Tuesday's going to be this, Wednesday's going to be this. There's none of that. So I think I'll be much more prepared going in."
"Your rookie season, you kind of just got to go through it," Knueppel continued. "Going in and knowing what to expect in a back-to-back or in a, we have two days off, what should I do? How do I get my body ready to go for the next game? And so I think this is also, you never want to be injured, but I've never really gone through rehab, extended rehab. So I think that's also good to learn those skills as well."
That rehab is for a left hamstring injury. The Hornets announced Friday that he will miss all four preseason games.
He won Eastern Conference Rookie of the Month for each of the season's first four months, the first Hornet to win it four times, and led the league with 273 3-pointers.
Knueppel Wants Hornets to 'Expect Excellence'
Knueppel is not focused on the past, the result, or what other people are saying. His focus going into his second season is handling the increased expectations on both himself and Charlotte.
"I think a big part of this season was managing expectations, both for myself and as a team, because we're going to have more expectation," Knueppel said. "And I think the biggest thing is just how can you grow each day? How can you better every day? We preach that both as an individual and as a team and focusing on that and not necessarily the past or the result or what other people are saying."
"Because my expectations for myself is pretty high as well," Knueppel noted. "And so we just actually talked about in there, expect excellence. And that's where we're going to hold each other to. That's the standard I'm going to hold myself to. And I'm going to use that and do that going forward."
Cooper Flagg, his teammate at Duke, won Rookie of the Year with 412 points and 56 first-place votes. Knueppel finished second with 386 points and 44 first-place votes. The 26-point margin was the second-smallest since the current voting format began in 2002-03.
