Now that the regular season has concluded, award winners will start to be announced in the next couple of weeks. There’s relative consensus on who will take home most of the hardware, but the Rookie of the Year race won’t be obvious until voting results are tabulated and announced. The Charlotte Hornets’ Kon Knueppel has been the favorite for much of the season.
While Cooper Flagg will be sitting at home after his Dallas Mavericks failed to make the postseason, Knueppel has a chance to validate his voters’ support tonight when the Hornets host the Miami Heat in the SoFi Play-In Tournament. The winner of tonight’s 7:40 p.m. ET contest will travel to face either the Philadelphia 76ers or Orlando Magic on Friday, with the winner of that game facing the top-seeded Detroit Pistons in the first round.
Charlotte is a 5.5-point favorite for tonight’s clash at DraftKings Sportsbook, with the total set to 230.5. Below, I’ve highlighted my favorite prop bets centered around Knueppel.
Best Kon Knueppel Prop Bets on DraftKings Sportsbook
Kon Knueppel 20+ Points (-119)
Knueppel’s scoring slowed down towards the end of the season, as he only reached the 20-point threshold twice in his final six games. For the most part, that resulted from a dip in efficiency, as over his final 12 games, he posted just a 49.0% effective field goal percentage. I’m not convinced that that’s anything more than a product of shooting luck; his shot diet wasn’t quite as efficient, as he attempted 0.4 more non-restricted paint shots and 1.0 fewer above-the-break threes per game in his final 12 contests as in his prior 69, but canning floaters at a 29.0% clip and above-the-break threes at 29.2% isn’t going to continue for a guy who made such shots at 54.5% and 42.0% rates in his prior 69 games.
He has an extremely favorable matchup tonight. The Heat were all out of sorts defensively to close out their season, posting a pitiful 124.6 defensive rating in their final 15 games and giving up at least 130 points on six separate occasions. In part, that was the result of exceptionally poor shooting luck, but they did give up the ninth-most corner three-point tries, and Knueppel has made such shots at a 50.3% rate this season, the second-best among the 52 players to attempt at least 100 corner threes. He scored 20 or more in three of his four games against Miami during the regular season.
Kon Knueppel 4+ Assists (+109)
Shooting is Knueppel’s best asset — he finished as the league leader in total three-pointers made, just one ahead of his teammate LaMelo Ball — but it’s not all he can do. In fact, Knueppel is plenty capable of making an impact on the glass (5.3 rebounds per game), as a playmaker (3.4 assists per game), and even as a defender (91st percentile in points saved per 100 possessions). Towards the end of the season, he leaned into his passing more, dishing out four or more assists in three of Charlotte’s final five games.
Given the Heat’s defensive vulnerabilities towards the end of the season and their lightning-fast pace, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they gave up the sixth-most assists per game in the final 15 games. Tyler Herro is a problem defensively: he ranks just 729th in defensive RAPM across the last three seasons, and he’s averaged 0.4 fewer deflections per 100 possessions than he did last season. Herro is likely to draw the primary Knueppel assignment tonight, with Davion Mitchell shadowing Ball. Knueppel might also draw possessions against Powell, against whom he dished out two assists without a turnover, and on such possessions, his teammates might be able to take advantage of Herro via backdoor cuts.
