The NBA announced its 2025-26 Kia All-Rookie First Team on Wednesday night:
- Cooper Flagg — Dallas Mavericks (unanimous)
- Kon Knueppel — Charlotte Hornets (unanimous)
- VJ Edgecombe — Philadelphia 76ers (unanimous)
- Dylan Harper — San Antonio Spurs
- Cedric Coward — Memphis Grizzlies
The same five names were the only players to receive any votes in Kia Rookie of the Year balloting. Flagg edged Knueppel for top honors, closing one of the more genuinely contested ROY races in recent memory.
The class itself
This is the deepest top-five rookie cohort the league has produced in twenty years, and it is not particularly close. Flagg was the No. 1 pick out of Duke and finished his rookie year with averages that put him in a four-name club with Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, and Luka Dončić — including becoming the youngest player in NBA history to score 50. Knueppel led the entire league — not just rookies — in three-pointers made (273), and as we covered in "The Rookie Who Rewrote the Record Book," his shooting is the reason Charlotte went from 19 wins to 44 and back to the playoffs for the first time since 2016.
Edgecombe (No. 3 pick, Baylor) gave Philadelphia a credible secondary creator on a roster that needed one badly post-Embiid uncertainty. Harper (No. 2 pick, Rutgers) split lead-guard minutes for San Antonio next to Wembanyama and produced exactly the level of self-creation the Spurs were drafting for. Coward (Memphis) is the under-the-radar story of the cohort: a late lottery pick who became a starter by January and a 17-and-7 nightly producer down the stretch.
Second team and the read
The All-Rookie Second Team: New Orleans' Jeremiah Fears and Derik Queen, Utah's Ace Bailey, Sacramento's Maxime Reynaud, and Toronto's Collin Murray-Boyles. Bailey's placement on the second team rather than the first — after the No. 5 overall pick was billed as a possible ROY contender at draft time — is the only mild surprise on the full list. The voting reflected an extraordinarily clean tier break between the top five and everyone else.
What is striking is how distributed the cohort already is across the league's competitive structure. Flagg is the franchise player for a Dallas team rebuilding around him. Knueppel is the reason a small-market franchise is winning again. Harper is the No. 2 piece in a Spurs core that just played in the Western Conference Finals. Edgecombe is bridge talent in Philadelphia. Coward is the upside lever in Memphis. Five different team contexts, five different roles, five immediate impacts. Rookie classes of this depth do not happen every year. The 2025-26 class is going to be referenced for the next decade as a benchmark.
Source: NBA.com, NBC Sports.
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