SALT LAKE CITY \u2014 The Utah Jazz swung for the fences \u2014 and ignored all the pre-draft noise in the process.<\/p>\n
The Jazz took Rutgers forward Ace Bailey with the fifth pick in the 2025 NBA draft Wednesday, selecting the player that seemed destined to be a top-three pick before an odd pre-draft process.<\/p>\n
Bailey reportedly refused to work out for any team in the top five, drawing speculation that he (or at least his agent) was trying to formulate a drop to a preferred destination.<\/p>\n
That wasn’t Utah, but that didn’t stop the Jazz from taking Bailey, who is seen as the best pure scorer in the draft.<\/p>\n
To his credit, Bailey said he let his agent and inner circle deal with the pre-draft process and then trusted their advice.<\/p>\n
“I haven’t been worried about that. I’ve just been focusing on basketball. That’s the main thing. That’s why I’m here is just to play basketball,” Bailey said.<\/p>\n
So, no hard feelings?<\/p>\n
Preferred destination or not, it didn’t stop Bailey and his family from appreciating the moment.<\/p>\n
“When they called my name … it was very emotional,” Bailey said. “My mom, I mean, she’s crying; the whole table’s crying because they know the hard work and sacrifices we made to be in this position \u2014 not just me, but my family also.”<\/p>\n
Bailey was considered a top-three pick before the pre-draft shenanigans tanked his stock a bit. Utah, though, was willing to look past that and trust the talent.<\/p>\n
And there’s plenty of it.<\/p>\n
The 6-foot-8 forward’s game has drawn comparison to some of basketball’s top wings \u2014 Kevin Durant, Paul George and Jayson Tatum \u2014 and after a 17-win campaign, the Jazz are hoping he can at least get close to those heights.<\/p>\n
His pull-up game was elite at Rutgers despite some questionable (at best) shot selection. His advanced footwork and multiple combo moves allowed him to create space to get shots up.<\/p>\n
But he didn’t need much of it.<\/p>\n
Bailey was one of the best tough-shot makers in college basketball. His high release and great balance on his shots made it really tough on defenders. He also shot 39% on catch-and-shoot 3-pointers, showing he doesn’t need the ball to be effective.<\/p>\n
“A leader, confidence, hard worker,” said Bailey when asked what he could bring to the Jazz. “Just a player that pushes people to be the best. A very great teammate. … I’m the person that’s going to push everybody to be the best they can be, even the coaches.”<\/p>\n
But he was one of the more polarizing players in the draft \u2014 and that was before the pre-draft shenanigans.<\/p>\n
His shot diet was brutal \u2014 featuring mostly long, contested midrange pull-ups \u2014 and he rarely attacked the rim despite his length and bounce. His decision-making was shaky, and he at times lacked effort on the defensive end. In short, he didn’t maximize his tools.<\/p>\n
Was that coaching? Poor spacing? Or something riskier?<\/p>\n
Still, he has the talent to end up being the second-best player in the draft. And for a team like the Jazz still looking for a blue-chip cornerstone, he was worth the risk.<\/p>\n
And he knows there’s plenty for him to improve on leading into his first NBA season.<\/p>\n
“I feel like I can improve on everything. I’m very young. I’m just coming to the game, so it’s a lot of stuff I can improve, physically and mentally,” he said. “I mean, from jump shots to more creativity, to more ballhandling, just all over the place.”<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SALT LAKE CITY \u2014 The Utah Jazz swung for the fences \u2014 and ignored all the pre-draft noise…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":15789,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[1339,419,418,171,421,420,425,1260,50,422,1371,423,62,399,314,67,132,68,424,313],"class_list":{"0":"post-15788","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-cars","10":"tag-classifieds","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-homes","13":"tag-jobs","14":"tag-local","15":"tag-nba","16":"tag-news","17":"tag-radio","18":"tag-recreation","19":"tag-salt-lake","20":"tag-sports","21":"tag-television","22":"tag-traffic","23":"tag-united-states","24":"tag-unitedstates","25":"tag-us","26":"tag-utah","27":"tag-weather"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114748678721864225","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15788\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}