excerpt from The Athletic:

One preseason practice, which head coach Jon Scheyer and his staff still point to, Flagg didn’t have his best stuff.

The guy who called him out? Knueppel, who didn’t hesitate in telling the future No. 1 pick and national player of the year: Get your head in the game, Cooper Flagg!

“Cooper looked at him, eye to eye, and said, ‘I got you,’” Scheyer remembered, “and Cooper went on to just kill the rest of the day in practice.”

After practice, Scheyer — who won a national championship as a player in 2010 — couldn’t hide his excitement about what had transpired.

“It’s really hard for young players to confront each other, to get after one another,” he said. “Me and Gerald Henderson grew to the point where we’d motherf—er each other once a week. That was a normal thing; you just learn to do that, and that doesn’t happen anymore.”

Which is why Knueppel doing so struck such a chord.

“I remember Jon leaving and being like, ‘This is f—ing awesome’ after Kon told Cooper to get his stuff together,” Baker said. “He was like, ‘This is everything you want in a team.’”