Jeff Nordgaard, the No. 53 pick in the 1996 NBA Draft and Kon Knueppel’s uncle, played one season with Milwaukee.
If you happened to attend a 50-and-older basketball tournament in Memphis in early June, you may have noticed a man wearing a T-shirt that read on the front, “1996 Draft The Greatest Class Ever A Generation of Greatness.”
On the back, the shirt had the names of players selected in the first and second rounds of that draft listed in order.
Jeff Nordgaard, the man wearing the shirt, was the 53rd overall pick in the second round in 1996 and is the uncle of Charlotte Hornets 2025-26 All-Rookie guard Kon Knueppel.
(Photo courtesy of Jeff Nordgaard.)
Nordgaard said he wears that shirt with immense pride and satisfaction.
“I met this guy last year at the Final Four, and he’s a Kon Knueppel fan as well,” Nordgaard said. “He enjoyed watching him play last year, and he has a t-shirt business. We just stayed in contact, and he decided to make the t-shirt.”
Nordgaard, who starred collegiately at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, played in 13 NBA games for the Milwaukee Bucks in 1997-98 after spending the 1996-97 season in France and Spain. Following his NBA stint, he had a successful career in Europe.
Kon’s mom, Chari Nordgaard Knueppel, who is Nordgaard’s sister, also starred at UW-Green Bay. Nordgaard and Nordgaard-Knueppel are both members of the Green Bay Phoenix Hall of Fame and both were named “Top 50 Most Influential Leaders in Green Bay Athletics History.”
Nordgaard has great stories to tell and is a splendid storyteller, recalling the time he torched Kentucky and was part of the team that upset Cal in the 1994 NCAA Tournament, and revealing that a young Kon altered the iconic SLAM cover photo featuring the top picks and pasted a cutout image of Nordgaard onto the photo. The photo is framed and hangs in Nordgaard’s office.
(Photo courtesy of Jeff Nordgaard.)
“I was young, maybe 9 or 10 when I did that,” said Knueppel, who was an NBA Player Correspondent for the 2026 NBA Finals, creating content and conducting interviews. “He likes to tell us every time we see him, ‘Have you ever heard of Ray Allen?’ He used to talk about how he beat him in free-throw contests. Obviously, he was a really, really good player in high school and then an all-time great player at Wisconsin-Green Bay.”
Nordgaard played four seasons at Green Bay, averaging 22.6 points per game on 55.4% shooting as a senior in 1995-96. Earlier that season, Nordgaard scored a game-high 29 points and also had eight rebounds, two assists, two steals and two blocks in a 74-62 loss to Kentucky.
“It’s one of the highlights of my college career, my basketball career in general,” Nordgaard said. “The ‘96 Kentucky team I still claim had the most talent collegiately of anyone in my lifetime. I mean, you could argue back when UCLA was the only game in town, maybe, but that Kentucky team had eight or nine guys who played NBA and ended up winning the national championship that year.”
Then-Kentucky coach Rick Pitino said of Nordgaard: “He’s all blood and guts. If our people played with that, we’d be unstoppable.”
After his senior season, Nordgaard participated in the Portsmouth Invitational and “that helped show that I can play with guys all over the country and not just my conferences and smaller division conferences,” he said.
#25 Wisc.-Green Bay vs UIC (1996) pic.twitter.com/er1V78z2Qs
— College Hoops (@CollegeHoops) December 11, 2020
He didn’t have a big draft party and wasn’t sure he would get drafted. “I would say it was a 50-50 chance. And the truth is I knew that going in.”
His parents watched the draft by themselves in Minnesota.
“They did not want to watch with people or anything like that,” Nordgaard said. “Part of it is they didn’t want to be disappointed in front of a bunch of people, and they just wanted to share the experience with one another and so they hid out.”
Nordgaard watched the draft with family and friends in Green Bay, “drinking some beers. A little bit different than Kon’s experience. I was about ready to fall asleep and then it happened and the Bucks grabbed me with the 53rd pick. It was pretty cool, pretty exciting.”
When his European career was over, he returned to the United States and eventually coached one of Kon’s AAU teams.
“As an elementary school kid and then in middle school and beyond, he had a mind for the game,” Nordgaard said. “As a fifth grader, he had a high schooler’s understanding. As a high schooler, he had an NBA guy’s understanding. It’s wild how far ahead he is in that part of things, aside from being an elite shooter and really strong in other parts of his game. It’s been such a fun experience to follow his high school success on to Duke and then the Hornets this year was just so exciting.”
Knueppel remembers his uncle being a wizard with Xs and Os.
“He was a stud on the clipboard,” Knueppel said. “Anything he drew up, it was a bucket. He was really, really good, and we have a special relationship just because we both love the history of the game.”
So excited to host the Hornets at our home in MKE! pic.twitter.com/btmkBHBpEz
— Chari Nordgaard Knueppel (@ChariNKnueppel) November 14, 2025
Knueppel, who set a rookie and franchise record for most made 3-pointers in a season, enjoyed his experience in San Antonio, getting a behind-the-scenes look at how the media works at the NBA Finals. He asked New York Knicks guard Josh Hart about his offensive rebounding, yielding a thoughtful answer.
And he had advice for the 2026 Draft class.
“Come in swinging and come in confident,” Knueppel said. “Let the coaches pull the reins back if they have to and really try to carve out a role for yourself and go for it.”
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Jeff Zillgitt has covered the NBA since 2008. You can email him at jzillgitt@nba.com, find his archive here and follow him on X.
