What Paul George Said About Ace Bailey, and Why He Took It Back

What did Paul George say about Ace Bailey?

Paul George said two almost opposite things about Ace Bailey, roughly a month apart, and the second one was him publicly taking back the first. On June 24, 2025, the day before the NBA draft, George used his show, Podcast P with Paul George, to go after the way an 18 year old prospect was handling his pre draft process. Bailey had skipped team workouts, including a scheduled session with the Philadelphia 76ers, the team George was playing for at the time. George did not soften it: “You’re not in a position to be making those demands.” He added that in Bailey’s shoes, “I can’t get mad if my stock drops.” The argument was straightforward. A player who has not yet taken a single NBA possession has very little leverage to choose his employer.

That was not a random swipe, either. George had spent earlier episodes praising Bailey’s game in real detail, talking up his size, his ability to score from almost anywhere on the floor, and his knack for shooting over the top of defenders. The criticism was aimed at the process, not the talent, which is exactly why it landed so hard and travelled so far. Plenty of people who had never watched a Rutgers game suddenly had an opinion about a teenager’s workout schedule.

And then he retracted it

Then the draft actually happened. Bailey went fifth overall to the Utah Jazz, nothing collapsed, and on the July 22, 2025 episode George changed his mind out loud. “I want to retract what I said on the situation,” he said. “How can we get on a kid who knows what he wants? We’re not in his shoes.” He kept going: “He wants to do it his way. He’s good enough, he’s got the talent. He’s going to go where he wants to go. Which, that’s his decision. It could have backfired, but it didn’t.” And then the line people still pass around: “Everybody has their own path. However you want to trail blaze, that’s on you.”

It is a small thing on paper, one podcast host revising a take. But it is the reason the search keeps resurfacing. A long serving NBA veteran told a teenager he had not earned the right to steer his own career, watched him steer it anyway, and said so publicly instead of quietly moving on. That kind of correction is rarer in sports media than you would think, and it is the sort of corner we chase on the news pages at fotobreak rather than filing another draft recap nobody reads twice.

Who is Ace Bailey, and how old is he?

His real name is Airious Bailey. He was born on August 13, 2006, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which makes him 20 years old today. He is listed at 6 foot 9 and around 200 pounds and plays forward, numbers that tell you both halves of the story at once: enormous reach and shooting touch, with obvious room left to fill out. Anyone who has followed long athletic wings who arrive in the league with more bounce than polish will recognise the shape of the project.

He started high school at Boyd-Buchanan School in Chattanooga, then moved to McEachern High School in Powder Springs, Georgia, a suburb northwest of Atlanta, for the rest of his schooling. By the time he graduated he had been named Mr. Georgia Basketball, played in the McDonald’s All American Game and the Jordan Brand Classic, and taken part in the Nike Hoop Summit. Being a nationally ranked teenager is its own strange job now, something recruits who become household names before they finish school understand better than most adults do.

Where did Ace Bailey go to college?

Rutgers, for exactly one season. In 2024-25 he started all 30 games he played and averaged 17.6 points with a team best 7.2 rebounds in 33.4 minutes a night, shooting 46 percent from the field and 34.6 percent from three, adding 1.3 blocks and 1.3 assists. He scored 527 points, the second highest total by a true freshman in Rutgers history, and made both the Big Ten All Freshman Team and third team All Big Ten. His backcourt partner that year was Dylan Harper, who went second overall to San Antonio in the same draft. One season and out is now normal at that level, a long way from the era of players whose college eligibility is picked over for years or transfers waiting on an eligibility ruling before they can play.

What happened on draft night?

Cooper Flagg went first to Dallas, Harper second to San Antonio, VJ Edgecombe third to Philadelphia, Kon Knueppel fourth to Charlotte, and Bailey fifth to Utah. The mechanics of the attention were simple: Bailey had been talked about as a top three lock for most of the season, he slid a couple of spots, and every broadcast in the country had a ready made storyline about whether the workout decision had cost him. Draft night is one of the few nights a year when the people who actually run franchises make their thinking visible in real time, and audiences love watching a plan meet reality.

What does Ace Bailey do day to day?

He is a professional basketball player for the Utah Jazz, which in practice means a life of shooting sessions, film work, weight room hours and flights. His rookie season was strong. He played 72 games, started 61 of them, and averaged 13.8 points, 4.2 rebounds and 1.8 assists in 27.6 minutes, shooting 44.3 percent from the field. He had 23 games of 17 points or more, took part in the 2026 Rising Stars event, and finished on the NBA All Rookie Second Team. Jazz president Austin Ainge summed up the offseason assignment in the plainest possible terms, pointing at the weight room and noting that roughly 15 pounds would change how Bailey finishes at the rim, rebounds and draws fouls. He started the season, after all, at 18.

Why is Ace Bailey trending now?

September is preview season, and the question hanging over Utah is a crowded one. Bailey is entering year two alongside Lauri Markkanen, guard Keyonte George and Darryn Peterson, the Kansas guard Utah took near the top of the 2026 draft. There are only so many possessions to go around, and the reporting around him has shifted from potential to allocation: minutes earned rather than handed over. That is a familiar squeeze, the same one other young Jazz forwards competing for a rotation spot have felt, and it is the kind of story that keeps a name in the search bar without anything dramatic happening. Meanwhile the Paul George clips recirculate every time someone posts them, because a retraction ages better than a hot take. The wider lesson usually offered is that becoming a reliable defender, the way wings who built careers on defense first did, is what turns a scorer into a starter for a decade.

Who are the people around Ace Bailey?

Basketball is the family trade. His mother, Ramika McGee, played college basketball at West Virginia. His father, Richard Bailey, played at the University of Houston. His aunt, Venus Lacy, played in the WNBA and won a gold medal with the United States team at the 1996 Olympics. That is three generations of people who already knew what a season costs, which may explain a family willing to make an unpopular decision in public and sit with the noise for a month.

Around that sit the usual supporting cast: Rutgers teammates, an agent, a small circle of advisers, and a fanbase in Salt Lake City that has adopted him quickly. Readers who land here often go looking for other well known people who share the Bailey name, or for the wider Tennessee thread that runs through names like the Nashville singer with the tattooed everyman story and the Memphis food reviewer whose reviews can fill a restaurant overnight.

Where can you follow Ace Bailey, and what happens next?

The reliable places are his official NBA and Utah Jazz player pages, which carry game logs, video and injury notes, plus the Jazz social channels. He posts himself, though like most young pros he keeps it light, and the lesson of athletes whose offhand posts become national stories is not lost on anyone in his position. On money, the honest answer is that his earnings come from a rookie scale contract set by the league agreement and tracked publicly by salary databases, while his endorsement side is not fully disclosed, unlike players who build a visible brand portfolio early.

What happens next is the ordinary, unglamorous part. A second season, a heavier body, better defensive habits, and the slow grind of being judged night after night the way young pros who arrive with huge expectations always are. Some of that class will stick, some will end up like forwards who carved out solid, unspectacular careers, and a few will leave for leagues abroad the way guards who could not find a rotation spot at home have done. The coverage will keep swinging too, because that is what the machine built by the man who founded a 24 hour sports network does. Paul George simply did the unusual thing and admitted, on the record, that the first swing had missed.