The Ace Bailey Situation Keeps Getting Weirder…

The Ace Bailey Situation Keeps Getting Weirder…

ace Bailey was the number one storyline of the 2025 NBA draft he was a top three prospect for the entire college season and it was almost guaranteed that he was going to be a top three pick going into the draft process and then things got weird and now he might not even show up for the Utah Jazz the team that drafted him which could create a completely unprecedented situation where the Jazz might have to trade him before he even shows up now going into the draft I was thinking that Ace Bailey was going to go either fourth or fifth overall but I really didn’t expect him to end up on the teams that actually had those picks going into the draft i was pretty confident it was going to be Cooper Flag Dylan Harper then VJ Edgecom and then some team whether it be Washington or Brooklyn one of these preferred destinations for Ace Bailey one of these teams that he wants to play for was going to trade up to four or five or he was just going to fall all the way to six and the Wizards would just take him there and none of that happened we get to five overall and the Jazz just say “You know what this guy’s the best player available he’s a top three talent in the class somehow he falls to five and we’re just going to take him the problem with that mindset is Ace Bailey is kind of sort of not really showing up and playing for the Jazz right now now to be clear he hasn’t actually skipped anything yet there’s nothing that he has to go to that he hasn’t gone to yet but that’s happening on Monday here in a couple of days training camp begins for NBA summer league and Ace Bailey has to be there and the weirder part of all this is the fact that we haven’t really heard from Ace Bailey himself he clearly had just like a weird reaction to being drafted by the Jazz in general on draft night and their other first round pick the Jazz’s other first round pick Walter Clayton Jr has already reported to the team and was there immediately whereas Bailey still hasn’t really reported to the team and just to add to the situation there are rumors coming out that there was a team in the top five of the draft that Ace Baileyy’s representation said “We will not show up if you draft him.” Like Ace Bailey will not play for your team if you draft him we don’t know what team that is but it very well could have been the Utah Jazz his reasonings for not wanting to go to these teams are not really wellnown but we can kind of infer that he didn’t want to go to Philly cuz he wants to be a star he doesn’t want to go to Utah and Charlotte because of the markets he wanted to go to Washington or Brooklyn and neither of those things happened and it’s pretty unknown at this point whether or not he’s actually going to show up and play for the Jets now his representation as a whole he’s got an agent that’s not a certified agent but he’s part of an agency that represents him as a whole they came out and said they’re excited for him to be in Utah and they think it’s a great basketball fit but again we haven’t heard that from Ace Bailey yet and he hasn’t actually showed up himself with just a few days to do so and let’s just say in theory Ace Bailey is not planning on showing up for the Utah Jazz there’s a couple of things that can happen here it’s already pretty much been said not necessarily publicly by the Jazz but just in general uh whether it be insiders or rumors that he’s playing for the Utah Jazz at least from the perspective of the Jazz organization they drafted him they own his draft rights if he wants to play in the NBA he’s going to play for the Utah Jazz that is their current stance and that’s how the NBA draft works right or wrong fair or not fair Ace Bailey tried to push himself to a particular situation but ultimately he doesn’t actually have control over who drafts him because he skipped workouts he didn’t show up for stuff he tried to tank his draft stock on purpose and it just didn’t happen and so either Ace Bailey is going to have to show up and play for the Jazz anyway or he’s going to have to make this such a miserable situation the Jazz just say “Okay you know what we will move you.” The problem with that is the only way for him to really do that is just to not show up and refuse to report for the team which one is going to cost him money and two isn’t necessarily going to make any of these other teams super excited about trading for him in a scenario which Ace Bailey does not show up I guess there could be a trade possibility here with either Washington or Brooklyn because they see that they can go and get a guy that they definitely wanted on draft night i think Washington’s taking Ace Bailey if he falls to six and the Nets are definitely taking him if he falls to eight and the Nets specifically are an interesting situation because going into the night they had five draft picks nobody thought they were going to take all five guys and then they took all five guys so theoretically they could use some of these other draft assets that they actually used and send those to Utah depending on how much Utah likes the guys that they actually picked but after the fact draft trades for guys that just don’t want to go to a particular team really don’t happen ever we do sometimes see players get drafted and then get traded later andrew Wiggins is a pretty famous example of a guy that got drafted first overall by Cleveland then they later on trade that first overall pick for Kevin Love but it’s not that Andrew Wiggins didn’t want to go there there’s the fact that LeBron showed back up in free agency and the draft happened first and then the Cavs were like you know what let’s go ahead and try and go win a title here let’s trade Andrew Wiggins we don’t need the number one overall pick like developing here we need a proven commodity and that was just an entirely different situation than Ace Bailey saying I’m not going to play this was a little bit more common in the early 2000s when we had teams like Vancouver in the league that guys just didn’t want to play for it wasn’t the fault of the franchise really it was just these guys are from the US they’re from a lot of different places and they just don’t want to play in Vancouver so they say they’re not going to and the teams would trade them but those teams didn’t have Danny A essentially running the team and it’s very clear that Danny A sees the value and the talent of Ace Bailey and decided that it was worth the headache of this entire situation and once he made that decision and went ahead and drafted him the choice was essentially made for Ace Bailey and like I said earlier right now if he wants to play in the NBA there’s one team he can play for and it’s the Utah Jazz and there’s really not a a path here that allows him to actually force his way out without costing himself a bunch of money and there’s no real guarantee that that would actually work anyway the only real resolution to this if you ace Bailey uh that allows you to get a a pretty quick resolution to the situation is if Washington or Brooklyn are so desperate to trade for him and they see it as a real possibility that they give Utah even more value than they would have been willing to on draft night and add that to whatever draft class they just put together utah’s not going to trade Ace Bailey for less than they could have gotten on draft night now after the fact just because Ace Bailey says that he’s not going to show up and if you’re the Wizards of the Nets if you really wanted him that bad that you would have traded up then you would have done it on draft night so it seems really unlikely that one of those teams is going to come out of nowhere with this huge offer to trade for Ace Bailey only other scenario here is something that had a little bit of momentum going into the draft and definitely the speculation of this was increased once they selected Ace Bailey and that is the Jazz picked him to trade him but not in the way we initially anticipated it wasn’t to trade him to Washington or Brooklyn but it was to have him be the focal point of a Jaylen Brown trade or one of these other trades potentially around the league obviously Danny H has that relationship with the Boston Celtics and if you were the Celtics and you’re looking to trade Jaylen Brown Ace Bailey is a really attractive focal point of that trade offer in comparison to some of the other players the Jazz could have selected fifth overall so even though the Jazz are saying right now they’re going to keep him in a scenario in which they were trying to put together a big-time trade Ace Bailey was the selection that made the most sense for them but what I think is happening here is I think they just misplayed the entire situation ace Bailey is representation whatever advice he’s getting they just misplayed it if they had just done the draft process normally I think he probably goes third overall to Philadelphia philadelphia really likes BJ Edgecom he’s probably going to be really good but the talent and the upside was clearly on Ace Bailey side here it’s not the fact that BJ Edgecom can’t be a really really good player but the shotmaking the offensive skills that Ace Bailey has more so represents what you’re looking for in a top three pick and if he played it normally he’d probably be a sixer right now he’d be on a good team he’d have maybe less of a role than he wanted to but a clearly defined role that’s going to allow him to develop worst case he was going to go four or five and he was going to make plenty of money and then you know from then on most of the time if you want to leave after six or seven years uh with your initial team if you’re really good then you’re allowed to do that but they didn’t play it correctly and ultimately they were one pick away from getting what they wanted but now it’s kind of the worst case scenario cuz he lost out on money falling from three to five potentially and ended up on a team that everybody knows he doesn’t want to play for his representation can say whatever they want to publicly they’ve spent bas trying to steer him to a specific destination and it didn’t work it’s a really really strange situation it’s something we have not had in a long time most of the time now in the modern era guys show up and say “Hey this is where I want to be drafted to.” And it may or may not happen like sometimes there are definitely guys that try and steer themselves to particular teams but a lot of times it happens later on in the first round it’s not often that it happens to the top five because teams see the value of a talent like Ace Bailey and so ultimately we might get a resolution on this this weekend but what I’m anticipating happening is Monday’s going to roll around ace Bailey is going to show up to training camp at the summer league he’s going to realize okay I I lost this battle this isn’t going to work and then he’s going to have to become a really good NBA player and then maybe he can have some leverage down the line but until that happens he’s going to be a member of the Utah Jazz unless something really dramatic happens between now and

Ace Bailey was the number 1 storyline of the 2025 NBA draft. He was a top 3 prospect for the entire college season – it was almost guaranteed that he would be a top 3 pick going into the draft process… and then things got weird… and now he might not even show up for the Utah Jazz, the team that drafted him, which would create a completely unprecedented situation.

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