It’s time for the season’s first edition of the NBA Rookie Rankings, and I can’t emphasize enough how much more exciting this class is as compared to last season’s group.

Last year, very few rookies were productive in a way that actually had a chance to impact winning basketball — especially early. So far in 2025-26, I can point to several first-year players who are positively impacting their team’s bottom line, from the top-three players ranked here who were all selected in the top 10 to the second-rounders who round out my top 10.

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A refresher on this exercise: We rank the league’s top 15 rookies, based on how they have played in the NBA thus far, not as a projection of who they will become.

What do I look for when I rank players? Minutes and roles matter. What is each rookie getting asked to do? How often are they seeing the court? Are they being asked to create offense? Is their role limited, and how successful are they in that role? How successful is the team with them within that role? What is the degree of difficulty of said role? Is the player logging major minutes on a good team or eating up minutes for a bad team?

This is an art, not a science. The rankings involve examining numbers and analyzing a painstaking amount of tape; I value the latter more.

I’ll highlight three of the rookies in-depth and then offer notes on the rest of the rankings. (Stats below are entering Thursday’s games.)

Knueppel picks up slack without LaMelo

The injury bug has again hit LaMelo Ball and Brandon Miller, forcing the Charlotte Hornets to rely on rookies to salvage what had been an extremely competitive start to their season. In the five games Ball has missed, the Hornets are 2-3 with a couple of brutal losses. However, the play of the rookies has been a true bright spot, and Kon Knueppel is the main reason why.

Over this five-game stretch, Knueppel is averaging 21.8 points, 8.4 rebounds and four assists while posting a 61.1 true shooting percentage. When Knueppel leaves the court, the Hornets are blown out by about 30 points per 100 possessions. He's taken over as the primary offensive option and is playing remarkably well while doing so. Stepping into a larger role while maintaining the same level of high-end play is a situation Knueppel knows quite well from his time at Duke — he did the same thing in the ACC tournament when Cooper Flagg went down with a sprained ankle. He won the ACC tournament MVP award and led the Blue Devils to the title.

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What's been most fun about Knueppel in Charlotte is how coach Charles Lee is using him within the offensive scheme. He's being weaponized as a movement shooter, with the ability to fly off different screening actions like curls or flares. He sets killer on-ball screens with contact thanks to his strength, but he also has the IQ to know when to slip them into open space. Knueppel's intelligence off the ball is also elite, as he relocates sharply into dangerous areas off t