{"id":494633,"date":"2026-04-28T07:34:50","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T05:34:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/?p=494633"},"modified":"2026-04-28T07:34:50","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T05:34:50","slug":"cooper-flagg-wins-2026-nba-rookie-of-the-year-after-tight-race-with-kon-knueppel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/cooper-flagg-wins-2026-nba-rookie-of-the-year-after-tight-race-with-kon-knueppel\/","title":{"rendered":"Cooper Flagg wins 2026 NBA Rookie of the Year after tight race with Kon Knueppel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p data-start=\"1302\" data-end=\"1546\">Cooper Flagg has been named <strong data-start=\"1330\" data-end=\"1356\">NBA Rookie of the Year<\/strong> after a narrow race with Kon Knueppel. The <strong data-start=\"1400\" data-end=\"1420\">Dallas Mavericks<\/strong> rookie received 56 first-place votes, while Knueppel finished with 44 in one of the closest contests in recent award history.<\/p>\n<p data-start=\"1548\" data-end=\"1777\">At 19, Flagg became the second-youngest player ever to win the award, behind only LeBron James. He averaged 21.0 points, 6.7 rebounds and 4.5 assists, joining Larry Bird, Michael Jordan and Luka Doncic in a historic rookie group.<\/p>\n<p data-start=\"1779\" data-end=\"1992\">Knueppel averaged 18.5 points, 5.3 rebounds and 3.5 assists while setting the NBA rookie record with 273 made threes. \u201cI was watching Kon just because that\u2019s one of my brothers,\u201d Flagg said after the announcement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cooper Flagg was named 2026 NBA Rookie of the Year, edging former Duke teammate Kon Knueppel by just 26 voting points<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":494632,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_spbk_hide_featured":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[399],"tags":[],"rumors":[],"typology":[],"posizionamento":[],"class_list":["post-494633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nba"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/5\/2026\/04\/HG8rig8bEAAUtUK.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/146"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494633\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494633"},{"taxonomy":"rumors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rumors?post=494633"},{"taxonomy":"typology","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/typology?post=494633"},{"taxonomy":"posizionamento","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportando.basketball\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posizionamento?post=494633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}