How Duke's Kon Knueppel Emerged From A Basketball-Crazed Family Into A Top NBA Prospect

Forbes

03-04-2025

As they prepared to watch their oldest son, Kon, compete for Duke in the NCAA tournament East Regional final last Saturday night in Newark, N.J., Chari and Kon Knueppel were busy searching the internet for flights. Their youngest boys had just won in the quarterfinals of the Lutheran middle school basketball nationals in Fort Wayne, Ind., advancing to the semifinals taking place at 11:20 a.m. local time Sunday. The Knueppels and their other two boys, both high schoolers, didn't want to miss the game. The only problem? It would cost $9,000 for the four of them to fly to Fort Wayne. The Knueppels then decided to rent a Nissan Rouge for $150.
At midnight, shortly after watching Kon score a game-high 21 points and lead Duke to a victory over Alabama, the Knueppel parents and their two sons, Kager and Kinston, started driving in the SUV. Ten hours later, they arrived in Fort Wayne, exhausted but in their happy place, watching basketball. The youngest boys, Kash and Kidman, ended up winning the middle school championship, continuing a streak that began a week earlier when Kager and Kinston helped Wisconsin Lutheran High School win a state championship.
This weekend in San Antonio, it is Kon's turn to go for a title. The 6-foot-7 freshman guard will be in Duke's starting lineup Saturday night when the Blue Devils face Houston in the Final Four. If they win, they will face Auburn or Florida in the championship game Monday night.
'Our March mantra has been, 'Just keep winning,' and the boys keep doing it,' Chari said.
Chari has attended each of Kon's 38 games at Duke this season, spanning 11 states and thousands of miles. Kon, a school counselor, has been at nearly 20 Duke games when he can get time off work. They have seen their son, whom they refer to as Kon II (his middle name is actually II), emerge as a projected lottery pick in June's NBA draft. They understand all the work he has put in to get to that position.
'I still get chills every time he takes his warm-up off to get in that starting lineup,' Chari said.
Both of Knueppel's parents were stars themselves. Chari grew up in a small town in southwestern Minnesota, 10 miles from South Dakota, and attended the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where she played from 1995 to 1999. She is still the school's all-time leading scorer with 1,964 points and 16.8 points per game. She then played professionally in Greece for a year. Her brother, Jeff Nordgaard, also starred at UW-Green Bay, where he is third with 1,911 career points. The Milwaukee Bucks selected Nordgaard in the second round of the 1996 NBA draft. Nordgaard appeared in just 13 NBA games, but he spent 13 years playing professionally overseas.
Meanwhile, Kon scored 2,064 points (second all-time) at Wisconsin Lutheran College, a Division III school in Milwaukee where his father, Paul, served in numerous roles over the years, including basketball and softball coach, athletics director and vice president of student affairs.
After graduating in 1998, Kon and his three older brothers dominated in the prestigious Gus Macker half-court, 3-on-3 tournaments throughout the Midwest. They became known as the 'Flying Knueppel Brothers' and were inducted into the Gus Macker Hall of Fame. They had more than 40 plays, set numerous screens on every possession, shared the ball and primarily shot from the 3-point line.
A grainy YouTube video shows the brothers winning a Gus Macker game in 2003 in Belding, Mich. The announcer noted that Kon, known as Konnie among his family, had recently become engaged.
In August 2005, Chari gave birth to Kon II. She and her husband signed their son up for basketball in kindergarten. It didn't go well. Knueppel didn't score in any of the 10 games.
'He actually ducked a number of times when the ball was passed to him and then had the gall to tell us he didn't like sports,' Chari said.
The next year, Kon took his son to a camp run by Wisconsin Lutheran High School coach Ryan Walz, his old high school teammate.
'He was like, 'Here he is. I don't know what you can do with him. He hasn't gotten into basketball yet, but he likes to read books,'' Walz said. '(Knueppel) was OK, but you could tell he didn't love basketball yet.'
By second grade, Knueppel began to enjoy the sport, partly because he had played the NBA 2K video game and wanted to emulate the players. Starting in sixth grade, Chari and Kon rented a small gymnasium in Milwaukee so Knueppel could shoot every day. By then, the family had four other boys, who would tag along to the workouts. The routine continues to this day, with the boys and their parents shooting hundreds of shots each night.
When Knueppel entered Wisconsin Lutheran High School, which is six blocks from the family's house, he immediately played on the varsity team. That April, he received his first scholarship offer from the University of Toledo, whose head coach, Tod Kowalczyk, is married to Chari's sister. The next month, he secured an offer from Marquette, a Big East Conference school that's five miles from home.
'When they called him and offered him, he got off the phone and he said, 'Holy smokes, I've got to get a whole lot better at basketball,'' Chari said. 'I don't want to say the pressure was on, but he realized, 'Wow, there's some great opportunities out there that are going to be coming, and I just want to make sure that I'm prepared for it.''
Over the next couple of years, Knueppel kept improving and had numerous other Division 1 college offers. Still, unlike many other stars who transfer and move away from home to play against better competition, Knueppel never considered leaving Wisconsin Lutheran. His grandparents on both sides of the family live in Milwaukee, as do his father's three brothers and sister and his mother's sister. He has about 20 cousins in the area, too.
Knueppel also had a chance to play in Closed Gyms, a full-court, 5-on-5 basketball league that his father started more than 20 years ago primarily for former college players in the area. Kon, who turns 50 in October, is the oldest player in the league and still a lights-out shooter, while his sons are the youngest in the league and learn from playing against veterans.
'We wanted him to be like a normal high school kid,' his father said. 'We wanted to have those experiences with all four years with his buddies and doing homecoming and prom and all that stuff. Going somewhere else to prep school, we didn't want him to start that too early in his life. We knew that would happen with college.'
Duke started showing serious interest in Knueppel in the summer after his junior season in high school. Blue Devils coach Jon Scheyer planned on watching him play at a Nike EYBL grassroots event in Atlanta in June 2023, but Knueppel had food poisoning and couldn't compete. Later that month, Scheyer saw Knueppel perform at the National Basketball Players Association Top 100 camp in Orlando, Fla. On July 2, Duke offered Knueppel a scholarship.
Knueppel committed to the Blue Devils in September 2023, choosing them over four other finalists: Marquette, Wisconsin, Virginia and Alabama. While Knueppel was known for his shooting and led the EYBL regular season in scoring, the coaches from those colleges all saw him as a more versatile player and someone who could dribble, pass and defend, skills that were apparent on the grassroots circuit.
'He had an incredible feel for the game, incredible skill set and obviously his ability to shoot separates him,' said David Rebibo, a coach with the Team WhyNot grassroots program in southern California who coached against Knueppel. 'But I think what people undervalued was his athleticism. He is deceptively quick, has a really good first step and can get off the ground in a hurry, which I think shocks people at times.'
Said Walz: 'Is he a fast twitch guy like some of these super, super long, athletic guys? No, that's not him. But at the same time, the coordination he has, the stop and start strength that he has, there's a lot of different ways to measure those metrics with athleticism."
As a senior last year, Knueppel moved from shooting guard to point guard, averaged 25.9 points, 8.6 rebounds and 5.3 assists per game and led Wisconsin Lutheran to a 30-0 record and the state title. He was named the state's top player but wasn't selected for the prestigious McDonald's high school All-American game despite being the No. 19 recruit in the Class of 2024, per the 247Sports Composite. Knueppel did compete in the Jordan Brand Classic, where he met and played with Cooper Flagg, the nation's top recruit and Duke commit.
Flagg and Knueppel are now roommates and Duke's two leading scorers. Flagg, a 6-foot-9 forward and shoo-in for the top pick in June's NBA draft, was named a unanimous first team Associated Press All-American and the Atlantic Coast Conference's Player of the Year. Knueppel, meanwhile, was a second team All-ACC selection. He is second on the team with 14.4 points per game and is shooting 47.7% from the field, including 40.1% on 3-pointers.
When Flagg missed two-plus games in the ACC tournament with an ankle injury, Knueppel was named the event's Most Outstanding Player, averaging 21 points, 5.7 rebounds and 4.7 assists in three games. This past weekend at the NCAA tournament's East Regional, Knueppel averaged 20.5 points, 4.5 rebounds and 4 assists per game. Duke ran more plays for Knueppel in last Saturday's game, and he took advantage.
'I don't know if that was the plan going in or if I just got a hot hand early,' Knueppel said. 'I just tried to step up in whatever role I need to do for the team. It's not necessarily something I've thought about across the year, but just whenever I had the ball, make the right play and go from there.'
Said Scheyer: 'With Kon, his versatility is huge for us, and his size. He's able to pass. He's able to finish. You feel he's always going to get off a good look because he has great pivots in the paint and great patience.'
On Saturday, Knueppel will play on the biggest stage of his career when Duke (35-3) plays Houston (34-4), which has a 17-game winning streak, tops in the nation and two more than Duke. The teams are No. 1 and No. 2 in the AP poll and the top two teams in analyst Ken Pomeroy's adjusted efficiency margin metric.
Duke is seeking its sixth national title and first since 2015 when the Blue Devils defeated Wisconsin in the championship game. Ten years later, the loss still stings in Knueppel's home state.
'There are a lot of people who aren't real big fans of Duke in Wisconsin,' Walz said. 'But Kon has a lot of followers here.'
Walz won't be able to make it to the Final Four because his son has a game, but Knueppel's parents and two younger brothers will be there. His two brothers in high school plan on playing in an AAU tournament this weekend, so they'll miss Saturday's game. They'll attend Monday's national title game if Duke advances, though.
Knueppel's four brothers are showing promise in the sport, although Walz said it's too early to project where they'll end up. For now, they can look up to Kon, who is excelling at Duke and could be among the top 10 picks in June's draft, two months before his 20th birthday. However this season ends, the family will be back in the gym on a daily basis, as always, shooting and working out and doing what they love.
'We're there instructing them, but they're doing the hard work,' Chari Knueppel said. 'We're super proud of the hard work they put in that results in all this winning we've been doing.'