261 Knueppel triples: Hornets rookie sets team record, gets surprise water bath
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Charlotte Hornets rookie Kon Knueppel set the team record for 3s in a season Thursday.
- Knueppel hit four 3-pointers in Charlotte’s 127-107 blowout win over Phoenix.
- The Hornets (41-36) are vying for play-in seeding with 5 regular-season games left.
Charlotte Hornets coach Charles Lee lay in wait, hidden behind a door that opened into the team’s press conference room.
Then the door opened and rookie Kon Knueppel walked in, fresh off setting the team’s record for 3-pointers in a season in a 127-107 home win over Phoenix.
“Whooooo!” Lee screamed, running toward Knueppel and shaking a bottle of water over his head.
“Congrats, my man!”
Knueppel tried to run away, but the coach tackled him from behind. Then the coach let him go and Knueppel recovered.
“That scared the crap out of me,” Knueppel said, laughing.
A few minutes later, Knueppel said he was suspicious when he walked in the door.
“Everybody’s got their camera out,” he said. “I knew something was up. He (Lee) got me a little bit. They already got me in the locker room, so I didn’t need that again.”
It was another feel-good moment in a feel-good season for the Hornets, who are now 41-36 and confidently striding toward the postseason. Knueppel’s four 3-pointers Thursday gave him 261 for the 2025-26 season, one more than Kemba Walker had in the 2018-19 season.
Walker is now an assistant coach for the Hornets, and he came in for some postgame ribbing too from the hyped-up Lee.
“The team didn’t like it when I said, ‘Kemba who?’” Lee cracked.
Walker had told Knueppel before the game to go ahead and get the record “because the previous two games I had one three (pointer) combined,” Knueppel laughed.
In this one, the big scoreboard kept a count, and everyone in the sellout crowd of 19,594 knew when Knueppel tied the mark. The 20-year-old Duke product then had a couple of good looks to break it and missed them both before a Grant Williams assist gave him a third chance, which he buried.
Knueppel was “super humble about it” afterward, Lee said. Knueppel said later he told Walker the only reason he was going to surpass the record was because Kemba “didn’t shoot enough threes” during his record-breaking years.
Anyone who saw the Hornets play back then knows that’s not true. Walker, sometimes the only real scoring threat for a succession of mediocre-to-bad teams, shot from everywhere. In the season he made 260 threes, he took 731. Knueppel has made 261 threes but has done that by shooting only 605 so far.
To be fair, Walker often had to create his own shot. Knueppel is the beneficiary of three other excellent scorers in the starting lineup — LaMelo Ball, Brandon Miller and Miles Bridges, all of whom look for him floating around the arc. He gets tons more catch-and-shoot, wide-open threes than Walker ever did.
Still ... 261 makes?!
That means you’re never getting hurt, you’re making 3-4 per game and, in this case, that you’re also leading the entire NBA in made threes (Luka Doncic is second with 253, while Ball is third at 243). The NBA record, incidentally, was set by Steph Curry with an otherworldly 402.
Bridges was a rookie when Walker set the record of 260. He came into his postgame press conference wearing a T-shirt that had a mockup of Knueppel’s recent cover on Slam magazine.
“It’s crazy, man, because Kim was so dominant during that time — he was third-team all-NBA,” said Bridges, who led the Hornets with 25 points Thursday night and several massive dunks. “So for Kon to break that record speaks volumes on Kon and for us as a team. We want everybody to succeed. We don’t care who’s scoring or who’s shooting, as long as we’re winning games.”
Knueppel’s parents — Chari and Kon I — were in the crowd at Spectrum Center. And that crowd rose in unison for almost every one of Knueppel’s 3-point attempts in the second half, anticipating a splashdown.
Knueppel said he felt that motion on each shot.
“It makes the ones that go in real sweet,” Knueppel said. “And it’s pretty reassuring as a shooter, that audible awww (when a shot misses). When the fans believe every shot you’re shooting is going in, that’s a cool feeling to have.”
Everyone has that feeling at the moment and will again Friday night when the Hornets face Indiana at home.
Knueppel has five regular-season games left to try to add to his franchise record. And then, after that, he should have a lot of years to try and break it.
This story was originally published April 3, 2026 at 5:30 AM.
