How Rutgers Became an Unexpected Landing Spot for Two Top Men’s Basketball Recruits

Five-star freshmen, and projected top NBA draft prospects, Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey will make the Scarlet Knights a must-see this season for fans and scouts.

Dylan Harper, left, and Ace Bailey are bringing a lot of attention to Rutgers in what is likely their lone college basketball season. / Justin James Muir/Sports Illustrated

FORTY MILES from Manhattan, Jersey Mike’s Arena in Piscataway, N.J., has long been a convenient destination for NBA scouts. Rather than trek to one of the Big Ten’s more remote campuses, why not catch a potential prospect in a road game at Rutgers instead? 

But this season, Rutgers isn’t just a convenient place to scout the Scarlet Knights’ opponents. It’s the center of attention for NBA talent evaluators planning for the 2025 draft. While Duke’s Cooper Flagg is the early favorite to go No. 1, Rutgers is the home of two potential top-five picks in Ace Bailey and Dylan Harper for what is likely to be a one-and-done year for both. Some believe Bailey may be the only player capable of unseating Flagg for the top spot in the class. 

To call Piscataway a surprising locale for future elite NBA talent would be an understatement. Since moving to a major conference in 1995 (the Big East, and then to the Big Ten in 2014), Rutgers has finished above .500 in league play twice in 29 tries. The last NBA draft pick directly from the school was in 2010, and the school’s last first-rounder was picked a few weeks before Bailey was born in ’06. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Rutgers to change the perception of its program forever, and maybe even reshape how top recruits think about what they should value in a college home. 

It’s been nearly two decades since Rutgers produced a first-round pick, but Bailey, right, and Harper both project as potential top-five talents. / Justin James Muir/Sports Illustrated

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RUTGERS COACH Steve Pikiell has been in college coaching 32 years, but the scene when Bailey committed to the Scarlet Knights after their January 2023 win over Ohio State was unlike any he’d experienced before. 

It was an emotional game: A gritty overtime victory in front of a sold-out home crowd against a team that had beaten Rutgers earlier in the season. Pikiell and top assistant Brandin Knight had been recruiting Bailey, a hyperathletic wing from McEachern High in Powder Springs, Ga., longer than any other power conference program. Bailey’s high school teammate Jamichael Davis, then a senior, had already committed to RU, so hope was building they could land the program-changing talent. But recruitments these days are often long, drawn-out affairs, and Bailey was just midway through his junior year of high school and very much in the process of blowing up. 

“Kids of [his] caliber, they can wait until the last day and they’ll have choices,” Pikiell says. “We had a good vibe with him and a good relationship. But you never know if they’re in that type of place [to commit].”

Bailey didn’t intend to commit during his on-campus visit to Piscataway. But as the day went on and he soaked in the atmosphere, he became more and more sold. Pikiell even kept pitching Bailey throughout the game with some quips from the sideline. “Coach Pike was talking to me and [Davis] during the game, he was like, ‘Y’all ready to put y’all stuff on?’ ” Bailey says. “I was like, Dang! That let us know that Coach Pike really wanted us.”

As the party started in the Rutgers’s locker room postgame, Bailey walked over to Pikiell and told him the good news. He wanted to be a Scarlet Knight.

“He’s coming!” Pikiell yelled out before the coach and future player were mobbed in a locker room scene that looked like a championship celebration. Pikiell says he’s never received a commitment after a game like that. In this day and age, there’s often negotiating between a prospect’s representatives and the school’s NIL collective to be done before a commitment can be made public. But Bailey was sold, and after quickly consulting with his mother to make sure he wasn’t getting caught up in the moment, he was ready to pick RU then and there. “It was really the perfect place for real,” Bailey says. “The best place out of all the options I had.” 

Bailey’s commitment to Rutgers helped spur Harper to join, too. / Rob Tringali/Sports Illustrated

Getting Bailey on board early was huge because Rutgers had long been in pursuit of another elite prospect in the 2024 class: Harper. The versatile combo guard with exceptional feel for the game had been around the program since middle school watching his brother, Ron Harper Jr., develop from a three-star recruit into a two-time All-Big Ten performer and NBA player with the Raptors. Plus, he was a hometown kid playing at Don Bosco Prep in nearby Ramsey. The challenge: The hometown school isn’t the sexy choice when that hometown school is Rutgers, especially when Duke, Kansas and Indiana are pushing hard for a commitment.

“I’d never watched [Rutgers] a day in my life, except for [2015–18 star guard] Corey Sanders,” Harper says of his ties to the school prior to his brother’s matriculation in 2018. “I just wanted to change the narrative that every kid that is from Jersey leaves Jersey. Every year, we have two or three five- and four-stars, but they never come here.”

Pikiell could already show Harper he knew his game better than anyone else. Now, he could show that Rutgers had the talent to win big with him. Bailey took recruiting matters into his own hands, regularly calling Harper to check up on him and try to nudge him toward the school. The two even teamed up on the AAU circuit for a weekend in April 2023, with Harper joining Bailey’s Georgia-based Athletes of Tomorrow team to get a taste of what playing together might look like. With an elite running mate next to him, a coaching staff that had treated him like family since before he was a top prospect and a chance for his actual family to come to every home game, Harper committed to Rutgers in December ’23.

“Go where you’re wanted, not where you want to go. That’s what my mom always told me,” Harper says.

Harper has teamed up with Bailey on the AAU circuit before both committed to Rutgers. / Rob Tringali/Sports Illustrated

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HARPER AND BAILEY have only been together in New Jersey for a few months, but it doesn’t take much time with them to see that their bond is already strong. They finish each other’s sentences, bicker about when they first officially met and even lend each other sneakers for a photo shoot at Rutgers’s College Avenue Gym.

“We’re basically like family,” Harper says.

A preseason trip to that old-school barn a few miles from the team’s current arena might be poetic, given expectations are higher now than at any point since the Scarlet Knights men’s team last played there, in the mid-1970s. Rutgers went to the Final Four in 1976 with a roster that included five current or future All-Americans, going 31–0 before losing to Michigan in the Final Four and John Wooden’s UCLA team in the third-place game. Since winning three games in that Big Dance, Rutgers has won three NCAA tournament games in the nearly 50 years since. 

Getting to the tournament in 2021 and ’22 was a monumental accomplishment considering how moribund the program was when Pikiell took over in ’16, but talents like Bailey and Harper give fans who once hoped for respectability a chance to dream bigger. Pikiell’s office features a corner with cases labeled for three commemorative basketballs: The first is full, marked for reaching the NCAA tournament. The second and third remain empty, with placards earmarking them for balls from a Final Four and a national championship. “We trying to get BOTH of them!” Bailey says with a smile, referring to those two empty slots in Pikiell’s office.

Lofty goals? Sure—but the talent Pikiell suddenly has lends itself to big ambitions. The 6' 10" Bailey oozes potential, having just turned 18 in mid-August and possessing the type of lanky frame and explosive game that resembles a young Kevin Durant or, more recently, former Alabama and current Hornets wing Brandon Miller. He explodes effortlessly off the floor for dunks, has the length to shoot over defenses and is a gifted passer. Stop by a Scarlet Knights practice and Bailey is guaranteed to do at least a few things that make you stop whatever you’re doing and watch. 

Bailey (4) averaged 33.4 points as a senior, while Harper scored 22.4 per game—welcome news for a program that was the lowest scoring in the Big Ten last season. / Justin James Muir/Sports Illustrated

Harper is also 18, but physically blends in more with a roster that’s otherwise littered with 22- and 23-year-olds. He looks like a modern NBA lead guard built in a lab, a chiseled 215 pounds at 6' 6", with elite court vision and the ability to get to the rim. He took Don Bosco (a football school, Pikiell adds) to a state title in basketball his senior year, winning the title game in the same arena he’ll call his home court in college.

Winning with freshmen has never been harder with the explosion of the transfer portal, but Pikiell believes the two are uniquely wired to play beyond their years. “They’re not the typical five-star kids,” Pikiell says. “Dylan wasn’t ranked the No. 1 freshman in New Jersey. He wasn’t ranked the No. 1 sophomore. He wasn’t even ranked the No. 1 junior. And neither was Ace [ranked No. 1] on any of those boards. They earned everything they got. Last year, all the sudden, everyone was talking about them. But there were a lot of other players rated [higher] forever and ever and ever. These kids weren’t. They’re true workers.”

The two freshmen live in apartments no more than a stone’s throw from the team’s state-of-the-art practice facility, next to Jersey Mike’s Arena. They have 24/7 access to a gym at the practice facility and take full advantage, getting up extra shots any time from the crack of dawn to midnight. It’s a basketball lover’s paradise, and make no mistake: Bailey and Harper are basketball lovers. 

“If we can’t sleep, we’re in the gym,” Bailey says. 

“You get bored, go to the gym,” Harper says. 

“You get mad, [go] in the gym!” Bailey says.

Harper and Bailey both have athletic genes in their families and share what Pikiell calls “old-school values.” / Justin James Muir/Sports Illustrated

They may have grown up more than 800 miles from one another, but their makeup is eerily similar. Each grew up in deep basketball families. Harper’s father, Ron, won NBA championships with the Bulls next to Michael Jordan and the Lakers next to Kobe Bryant. His mother, Maria, played at the Division I level and coached him from second grade on, and his brother is already a legend at Rutgers. Bailey’s mother, Ramika McGee; father, Richard Bailey; and aunt, Venus Lacy, each played D-I basketball, with Lacy winning gold for Team USA at the 1996 Olympics. Both possess what Pikiell calls “old-school values,” the work ethic and loyalty that kept them on the path to Rutgers even when the bluest of blueblood programs started calling. 

Both are embracing the challenge of lifting a college hoops also-ran into the sport’s top tier. “If you get all this hype and pressure, you’re doing something right,” Harper says. “You’d rather have it than not have it, because if you don’t have it, you’re chasing it. I think for us, even though we’ve got it, we’re still chasing it and trying to do even more.”

That these two have teamed up in Piscataway of all places still seems surreal, especially when you remember that before Pikiell, Rutgers was three coaches removed from its last winning season. Now, for at least one year, it’s home to as much NBA talent as any team in college basketball in 2024–25. 

“I like guys that are willing to do something a little bit different and have the confidence in themselves,” Pikiell says. “All your dreams can come true here at Rutgers.”