Evaluating the Harper-Bailey era at Rutgers as it comes to a close

“There’s really a lot of ups and downs, but I mean, life’s not perfect,” Dylan Harper said.

PISCATAWAY – Rutgers defeated Minnesota 75-67 in overtime on Sunday afternoon in the last game of the season and clinch the No. 11 seed in the Big Ten tournament.

Afterward, an older gentleman and I were walking up a stairwell in the RAC. I was heading to the postgame press conference, and I believe he was event staff, not directly affiliated with the athletic department itself.

“Well, at least they went out with a win!” he said jovially, or something to that effect.

I thought for a second. Rutgers needed overtime to beat Minnesota in the last game of the season just to clinch the No. 11 seed in the Big Ten tournament. You tell that to any Rutgers fan last September, and they would have called that an abject failure of a season.

Yet fans and students still turned out in droves on Sunday to witness (and sweat through) the final home game of the Dylan Harper/Ace Bailey era, if one season can be called an era. Barring a surprise home game in the NIT, that was the pair’s last game in Piscataway before going in the top five, likely even the top three, of the NBA draft this June.

I told my companion in the stairwell that even without a tournament berth, fans are going to think back on the year fondly because of how plain fun the wins were.

Maybe that’s a hot take, and maybe I’m naïve. There is plenty of anger right now in the Rutgers fan base, anger with Steve Pikiell, with his staff, with transfers who didn’t play quite the supporting role they needed to elevate the team.

But I don’t think there’s anger toward Harper and Bailey themselves, and when prompted five or 10 years from now to remember their Rutgers days, it’ll be Harper’s buzzer-beating winner against Seton Hall or the plays he made to beat Illinois or Minnesota. It’ll be Bailey throwing down alley-oop dunks or going for 37 to beat Northwestern.

The student section chanted “One more year!” late in Sunday’s win, but so did Duke fans in Cooper Flagg’s last game. It’s an expression of appreciation, more so than a misguided hope that these kids will actually put off their NBA careers for another stab at college glory. That said, of course fans don’t want this season to end. Not like this.

Harper, who scored 22 points against the Golden Gophers and broke Mike Rosario’s Rutgers freshman scoring record, was thoughtful as we asked him question after introspective question about his season, the whole college experience and the illness and injury setbacks that threw the season off the rails.

“There’s really a lot of ups and downs, but I mean, life’s not perfect,” Harper said. “That’s really what I can learn from that. … (The team’s veterans) always tell me I got to show up every day, whether it’s in practice or games, wherever I was going to show up and be the best me.”

He was asked if he thinks the adversity of this season will help him down the road in his life and career.

“Definitely, because it just shows you that, you know, anything can go wrong,” Harper said. “I think this season a lot of people had different expectations than what happened, but I mean, that’s life. I mean, life ain’t gonna go how you want it to go, but me and the guys did a great job just bouncing back, you know, and now we got a brand-new season ahead.”

Harper said he didn’t hear the “One more year” chants on the court.

“I was so in tune to the game, but I mean, I take one day at a time,” he said. “I’m not really focused on next year. Focused on this little journey we got ahead in Indianapolis, and I feel like me and the team can make a big run.”

I covered this game for Field Level Media and outlined the several big plays Harper made to will Rutgers to victory again, including a tough layup to take a 57-56 lead late in regulation and a savvy and technically perfect double pivot to spin past a defender and make it 61-59. He added a full-court lefty layup and a steal and score in the extra session, fully displaying his bag of tricks.

It wasn’t a good scoring day for Bailey (six points, 3-of-11 shooting), though that didn’t zap his defensive energy and he finished with nine rebounds and three blocks.

And though Rutgers’ middling season exposed some cracks in Bailey’s game in particular, neither Harper nor Bailey have seen their draft stock suffer as a result of a 15-16 record. ESPN’s Jeremy Woo did a great job breaking down the duo as prospects in this piece, and he pointed out that missing the NCAA Tournament didn’t stop Anthony Edwards, Markelle Fultz or Ben Simmons from going No. 1 in the draft.

The season didn’t hurt Harper and Bailey’s future, and it didn’t hurt Rutgers in the long run. Nobody from its four-man recruiting class, featuring two four-stars, is decommitting because RU missed the tourney. It was a bad year for Pikiell, who dealt with the headaches that come with five-star talent and didn’t squeeze a tournament appearance out of it. The pressure on him to get RU back to the dance certainly spikes in 2025-26.

Harper stayed on the court for several moments after the rest of the team had left, signing autographs for kids. But he said he wasn’t that wrapped up in the reality of that being his final game at the RAC.

“I don’t think I really thought about that,” Harper said. “I’ll probably think about that after I’m laying down, but I mean – that hasn’t really crossed my mind yet.”

………

Hello, and thanks for reading this rare Monday edition of Guarden State. As you may know, I’m running the newsletter for five straight days (Sunday-Thursday) to cover the culmination of the season, conference tournament week. Tomorrow’s will be the only edition walled off for paying subscribers, and I’ll get into previews of the Big Ten, Big East, Ivy and MAAC tournaments and more. Coverage of the MAAC from Atlantic City will follow.

Let’s clean the glass and hit a pair of New Jersey losses from Sunday:

• In the CAA quarterfinals: Charleston 79, Monmouth 78 (OT). What a wild way for the Hawks’ season to end: 15 lead changes, 15 ties and a real chance to win it in regulation. Abdi Bashir Jr.’s 3-pointer made it 72-70 in the final minute and Madison Durr rebounded a Charleston miss, but he had it poked away and the Cougars got an easy game-tying layup from it. Down three in overtime, the ball made it to Jaret Valencia down low with the clock about to expire; he scored and went looking for a foul and potential three-point opportunity, but no foul was called. Watching the replay at the end of this video, I thought at first that the Cougars defended it cleanly, but No. 3 does leave his feet. “We were trying to get Jack (Collins) a shot, they did a good job,” King Rice said afterward. “There wasn’t a lot of time, they defended it well. And Jaret got it, we tried to tell him to throw it out – a lot of contact.”

• Bashir finished with 24 points and six 3-pointers. His 127 triples for the season is a new CAA record and leads Division I. Since I did this with Xaivian Lee yesterday, it’s fair to ask if that will be Bashir’s final game in a Monmouth uniform. His coach has certainly made clear that he “knows what’s coming at the end of the year. Everybody get in line.” Bashir has countered his own coach by insisting that he hasn’t once talked with Rice about transferring, and remarking in a postgame interview that he hopes to have “a long stint” with Rice at Monmouth. Read my profile of Bashir from last month if you missed it here.

• In the women’s Big East semifinals: Creighton 73, Seton Hall 44. Seton Hall shot it ice cold for the second straight day, Creighton nearly doubling them up in made field goals and enjoying a 12-3 advantage in made 3-pointers. The Pirates fell behind 23-6 by the end of the first quarter and cut it to 11 at halftime before the Bluejays finished the job. Savannah Catalon fouled out in the third quarter, leading to a heartbreaking image on the broadcast showing her in tears on the bench. If ESPN bracketologist Charlie Crème knows his stuff (and as I’ve mentioned before, there aren’t enough women’s bracketologists with alternative opinions to compare him with), Seton Hall isn’t that close to the NCAA Tournament bubble despite a 22-9 record being the program’s best since it made the 2016 tourney.

• Scorecard for New Jersey D1 men’s programs and where their seasons stand (I’ll add the women’s teams in here starting tomorrow):

Rutgers: Wednesday vs. USC in Indianapolis, 8:30 p.m. (Big Ten tournament 11 vs. 14 game)

Seton Hall: Wednesday vs. Villanova in New York City, 9 p.m. (Big East tournament 11 vs. 6 game)

Princeton: Saturday vs. Yale in Providence, R.I., 11 a.m. (Ivy Madness semifinal)

Rider: Tuesday vs. Siena in Atlantic City, 6 p.m. (MAAC tournament 8 vs. 9 game)

Monmouth: Season over (13-20, 10-8 CAA, lost to Charleston in overtime in CAA quarterfinals)

Saint Peter’s: Season over (12-16, 7-13 MAAC, missed MAAC tournament)

FDU: Season over (13-20, 8-8 NEC, lost to CCSU in overtime in NEC semifinals)

NJIT: Season over (6-25, 3-13 America East, missed America East tournament)