Preseason Spotlight: Ace In The Hole

I’ve been around the sun a while when it comes to fantasy basketball, and if there’s one maxim I’ve picked up in all my fake-hoops-team managing, it’s that it generally pays to draft young players and to avoid old players. There are some self-evident reasons for this (young players tend to be less injury-prone, for one), but the biggest reason is that young players have dramatically more potential to exceed their draft status. They have a way higher chance of coming out of nowhere and blossoming into an elite stud, and thus, they have a way higher chance of giving you an edge in your league. And that’s the edge you should be risking to acquire, even if the players with that higher ceiling are less reliable than vets and more likely to be total flops.

This philosophy has manifested itself in several ways for me over the years. For one thing, I try to draft as few players over the age of 29 as I possibly can, and only if they’re the surest of surest things – guys like Nikola Jokic and Giannis Antetokounmpo and so on. But the other way it’s affected me is that when I go into a 12-team draft, I draft with the expectation that my final three selections are highly unlikely to still be on my roster after a month and that it’s worth it to take a big swing with those last three picks – specifically, a swing for young guys who have a chance to break out, even if that chance appears to be somewhat slim.

Enter Ace Bailey.

The No. 5 pick in the 2025 draft is, as of this writing, ranked 151^st on Yahoo – which means he’s slated to go in the 12^th round of most 12-team drafts. There are a number of intriguing players to pick from in that range; in fact, he’s currently nestled between Scoot Henderson and V.J. Edgecombe on Yahoo, both of whom are worth taking a dart throw on too, and ditto for Zaccharie Risacher. But Bailey to me is the perfect player to take a flier on, not because he’s necessarily the best young player at the end of the draft but because his situation is so advantageous.

Consider who he’s on. The Jazz are the worst team in the league, just lost guys like John Collins and Collin Sexton, and have a lot of incentive to trade away Lauri Markkanen at some point this season – which would create an even greater vacuum that Bailey could fill. Also, the only other small forwards on the team are players who should have an appreciably lower priority than Bailey, so there’s no reason not for him to be starting and getting a big chunk of minutes for them pretty early on, if not right away. Then consider the 25-6-3-2-1 line Bailey put up in his preseason debut on Wednesday. This is someone who has a chance to be a legitimate fantasy difference-maker by the time the season is over – a guy who can even help in defensive categories – and you could potentially get him with your very last pick in the draft.

Are there risks to Bailey? Sure. Maybe he’ll be a bad shooter, maybe he’ll struggle to assert himself in the early going, maybe his supposed character issues will rear their head at some point. But these are risks that are on par with those that you’ll find with just about anybody towards the end of the draft, and Bailey’s potential upside (at least from a fantasy perspective) supplants them all. And even if you could get more production out of a veteran player in this range (someone like Brook Lopez or P.J. Washington or Ty Jerome), the odds that any of them will still be on your team by the end of the season either – assuming you’re very active – is pretty damn low.

Ace Bailey is not going to look amazing on the player rater early in the season, but if he’s merely good enough to be worth holding on to as the rest of the team paves the way for his ascendance, then his selection will have more than paid for itself. It’s a low risk and, potentially, a very solid reward. None of us know how the season will unfold of course or which teams will become bereft of healthy talent, but from where it looks right now, Bailey – on a truly awful Jazz squad – has in my estimation the highest potential to give you an edge in a fantasy league in the 130 and over pick range. And that’s why if he’s still available at the end of drafts, I’d snag him at every chance I had. He might not pan out, but taking risks on guys like him are how you can find risers like Jalen Johnson in 2024 or Amen Thompson in 2025. And even if Bailey flops, it’s still better in the long run to be in the habit of trying to get the next Johnson or Thompson than it is to settle for an aging vet like Brook Lopez or Ty Jerome.