When the Charlotte Hornets selected Kon Knueppel with the fourth overall pick in the 2025 NBA Draft, everyone agreed he could shoot. Nobody knew he would shoot like this.
Knueppel capped his regular season by becoming the first rookie in NBA history to lead the entire league in three-pointers made, finishing with 273 made threes while shooting an elite 42.5 percent from beyond the arc on nearly eight attempts per game.
To put the scale of the record in context, the previous rookie three-point record was held by Sacramento’s Keegan Murray at 206 made threes in 2022-23. Knueppel did not just break that record, he shattered it by 67 triples. He also surpassed the Charlotte franchise record previously held by Kemba Walker.
Steph Curry, the greatest three-point shooter in NBA history, offered his assessment of Knueppel simply: you cannot leave him open at all because he has such a quick release and shoots with enormous confidence, and his playmaking is vastly underrated.
What makes the numbers even more extraordinary is the consistency behind them. Knueppel ranks second among all rookies this season in both effective field-goal percentage at 60.8 percent and true shooting percentage at 64 percent, metrics that reflect total scoring efficiency across all shot types rather than raw volume alone.
The NBA Rookie Ladder has consistently highlighted Knueppel’s combination of availability, precision, and team impact as the defining argument for his candidacy. He missed only one game all season and has been a central force in Charlotte’s transformation from a 19-win team last year into a legitimate postseason contender this year.
The historical company Knueppel now keeps is genuinely rare. His three-point record is not simply the most threes made by a rookie in a single season. It is the most threes made by anyone in the entire league as a 20-year-old playing in his first year of professional basketball. That is a sentence the NBA has never been able to say before. And it belongs entirely and permanently to Kon Knueppel.
