Latest Duke Chronicle Profile: Kon Knueppel

Kon Knueppel is one of the more interesting players to come through Duke in a good while.

We first realized it when we were listening to the fall episodes of the Brotherhood Podcast and when Caleb Foster asked his teammates who had surprised them most, they all said Kon Knueppel.

He kept creeping into the conversations as the season drew closer and it was pretty clear that he was going to be good.

We just didn’t know how good. Well, we all learned pretty soon, as this latest profile from the Duke Chronicle shows.

Knueppel famously learned an “old man’s game” playing in his father’s basketball league in Milwaukee and he played like it at Duke.

One of our favorite plays from this year was when Tyrese Proctor teetered on the edge of falling out of bounds with his leg stuck back for a problematic balance.

Well, Knueppel just grabbed his leg, kept him from falling out of bounds and saved the possession for Duke.

That foreshadowed his brilliant season. He’s most highly regarded as a shooter, yet he developed a tremendous chemistry with Khaman Maluach, often giving him perfect lob passes for easy points. He has been described, fairly, as an average athlete, but Knueppel proves, as others before him (Magic, Larry Bird, Steve Kerr, JJ Redick and Derrick White to name a few) that a solid basketball IQ often overcomes superior talent.

One of the great quotes of this season came from Cooper Flagg and it’s included here. When asked what he would take if there was an apocalypse, Flagg replied “some food, a gun and Kon Knueppel.”

That sums up Knueppel pretty well. For the Knueppel family: four more kids! Four more kids! Four more kids!