SALT LAKE CITY — Anthony Edwards made sure Ace Bailey knew what he had just done.
Late in Minnesota’s 120-113 win over the Jazz Monday, Bailey drove baseline, jumped around Edwards, and slammed home a high-flying reverse dunk.
So after the game, Edwards approached the Jazz rookie about the play.
“He asked if I dunked on him,” Bailey said with a smile. “I said, ‘Was that you?’ I didn’t know. I just went up.”
The play was an exclamation point on what was a special night for Bailey. For the first time, the 19-year-old wing was in Utah’s starting lineup.
“I thought Ace did great,” Jazz coach Will Hardy said. “For the most part, he played within the system offensively, and his burst and athleticism are very evident, not just off the dribble, but cutting, crashing the glass. He gives us a really good lift.”
Bailey found out he was being inserted into the starting lineup on Sunday during practice, and he immediately began asking questions.
“I didn’t want to be wrong about nothing,” Bailey said.
As he was on the training table getting taped up before the game, he asked Keyonte George about plays and certain sets. And he let his teammates know to be a bit hard on him.
If he messed up, he wanted to know about it.
“He takes ownership of everything he does,” said George, who had 27 points for the Jazz. “I think all the questions that he asked, like he came in prepared.”
Bailey’s stat line didn’t jump off the page — he finished with 10 points, seven rebounds and two assists in the loss — but his teammates and coaches left impressed with his performance.
He made hard cuts, he won offensive rebound battles, and he made good passes (Utah’s poor shooting kept his assist numbers down). In the end, he fit right in — and that stood out to his team.
“I just love the fact that he’s competing really hard,” Hardy said. “I think he’s a great teammate, and he’s showing the ability to really learn quickly. We’re getting more and more flashes of Ace’s talent and his ability.”
Flashes like when he reached over Edwards and tipped the ball to himself for an offensive board before finishing the play with a putback. Or the acrobatic reverse dunk. Or his one-footed fadeaway midrange jumper.
“I actually had seen him do it in college, which I was telling everybody,” veteran forward Kevin Love said of the midrange hit. “I don’t know if he practices it, but he’s done it in game. To be fair, he shot everything in college.”
And to his credit, Bailey hasn’t done that with the Jazz. Sure, some fans want to see him fire up 20-plus shots a night and let the team live or die on whether or not he gets hot. But there’s a process to this all.
And he’s embracing it.
He’s fine not being the central focus of the offense, and he’s happy trying to rebound and defend.
“Even when the opportunities for shots weren’t there, he was doing other things … like rebounding the ball — offensive rebounds — and, just, you could tell his intentions were to do the right thing,” Love said. “And you get your first start in the NBA. I can’t remember when mine was, but I know one thing’s for certain, I wanted to please everybody and do really well.”
Bailey had that same thought entering his first start. He just thinks he’ll remember it.
“My name being called in the starting rotation — I’ll never forget,” Bailey said. “I mean, that’s a dream come true.”
Love, though, likely had a similar feeling the first time he was introduced as a starter way back in 2008 in his fifth game as a pro. That was a lot of games ago, and he believes Bailey has a long career ahead of him, too.
“We haven’t scratched the surface yet,” Love said. “It’s going to be a beautiful thing as he starts to really take leaps and bounds. But for right now, you might not see it because we only have a small sample size, but he’s going to continue to get better.”
Fans got a glimpse of what that could be on Monday.
And so did Anthony Edwards.
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.