Ace Bailey injury cuts first contest against Cooper Flagg short

Everyone was looking forward to the first matchup between the 2025 NBA Draft’s No. 1 overall pick Cooper Flagg and the No. 5 pick Ace Bailey, but everyone is going to have to wait if they were expecting any kind of fireworks.

There’s still plenty of time for the rookies to battle it out on an NBA court — the Utah Jazz and Dallas Mavericks are set to face one another three times in the 2025-26 season — and hopefully both players will have long and fruitful careers full of memorable matchups, but the first meeting between the two on an NBA court was cut short on Monday night when Bailey unceremoniously left the court because of knee soreness with 3:06 left in the first half.

“He’s got some tendonitis in both knees,” Jazz head coach Will Hardy. “It’s nothing that we’re overly concerned with. He’s not going to be getting imaged or anything like that. It’s just trying to take care of him because he was a little sore during his second stint.”

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Bailey had checked into the game midway through the second quarter but was subbed out less than four minutes later and walked straight to the Jazz locker room.

The Jazz coaching and training staff had noticed Bailey wasn’t moving as spryly on Monday night. They had already been monitoring some light soreness recently, and had done some treatment after his first quarter stint.

“He was reaching for his knees a little bit and moving a little bit gingerly, and so then the conversation happens,” Hardy said. “And one of Ace’s best qualities is he’s very honest, so we just felt like tonight it was best to pull him and get some treatment.”

On the Mavericks side, it was a mostly uneventful night for Flagg, who scored 11 points on 3-of-13 from the field to go with seven rebounds.

On the bright side for the Jazz, Monday marked the return to the court for Lauri Markkanen and Kyle Filipowski, who had both been limited throughout training camp and were sidelined in the Jazz’s first two preseason games.

Brining Markkanen and Filipowski back into the fold — and hopefully getting Walker Kessler (left shoulder) back soon — gives the Jazz some extra size across multiple positions, which is something they are hoping to really use as they progress this season.

“If we’re going to play with bigger players on the court, the advantage has to be that we are better at controlling the interior,” Hardy said. “Can we protect the rim as a group and not rely on one person to do that and can we rebound a little bit better as a team?”

The Jazz finish their preseason slate on Thursday at the Delta Center against the Portland Trail Blazers. They’ll then have five days off before their regular season tips off on Oct. 22 against the visiting Los Angeles Clippers.