Utah State lost all three of the point guards on its 2025-26 roster, leaving a gaping hole in that part of the rotation. Head coach Ben Jacobson has brought in a couple of players to help fill that. The first addition, and the presumed starter at point guard, is Louisiana Tech transfer Anthony “AJ” Bates.
Bates grew up in the Houston area, attending Seven Lakes High School. He became a star there, and the school’s all-time leading scorer. But despite his career averages of 20 points, seven rebounds and six assists per game, he didn’t catch much high-major attention, ultimately opting to play for Louisiana Tech. In two years, he rose to an all-conference level player and has now moved up the college basketball ladder in coming to Utah State.
Biographical Info/Stats
- Height: 6’3″
- Weight: 200 lbs
- Class: Junior (2 years of eligibility)
- Hometown: Houston, TX
- High School: Seven Lakes
- Previous College: Louisiana Tech
AJ Bates Career Per-Game Averages
| Season | Team | GP / GS | Points | Rebounds | Assists | Steals | Blocks | FG% | 3P% | FT% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-25 | Louisiana Tech | 29 / 4 | 4.6 | 2.0 | 1.7 | 0.8 | 0.1 | 43.6 | 31.7 | 67.3 |
| 2025-26 | Louisiana Tech | 34 / 34 | 12.1 | 2.8 | 5.9 | 1.2 | 0.1 | 37.0 | 27.7 | 78.3 |
AJ Bates Advanced Metrics
| Stat | Value | Rank Within Team | Rank Within CUSA |
|---|---|---|---|
| Box Plus/Minus | -1.8 | 7th | 72nd |
| Win Shares | 3.2 | 3rd | 23rd |
| Bayesian Performance Rating | 2.00 | 2nd | 20th |
A note on source for stats in this section and later portions. Basic averages (points, rebounds, etc.) come from Sports Reference, as do the advanced stats of Win Shares and Box Plus/Minus. Bayesian Performance Rating comes from EvanMiya.com as does any lineup data used. All stats referencing specific shot types (such as shots at rim or jump shots) along with play-specific shot attempts (such as post-ups or spot-up shooting) come from Synergy Sports.
Scouting Report
Strengths
- Good size and strength for point guard
- Excellent court vision and passing
- Crafty scorer
Weaknesses
- Very poor shooting percentages
AJ Bates is a very good example of the point guard archetype. When you think of the traits a typial point guard will have, Bates has them. Aside from the minor critique that he’s not as quick as some prototypical PGs (which he makes up for by being a strong 6-foot-3 and 200 lbs), Bates gives you everything you want. He can score. He can pass. He can defend. He reads defenses and makes the right play.
If you want someone quarterbacking your offense, Bates is a pretty good candidate.
As a scorer, Bates is able to get to his spots using his size and a healthy dose of craftiness. He uses a combination of hesitations, pivots and spins to either create an open jump shot or work his way to the rim. Where others keep defenders on their heels with elite quickness, Bates makes himself unpredictable and capable of stopping or starting on a dime. Commit to stop one shot, and suddenly he’s taking a different one in the window the defender vacated.
There are concerns not-so-well hidden in this scoring style, though that’s going to get a deep dive in a minute. First, there’s a need to examine the blend of Bates’ scoring and his passing. And it comes through his experience in a pick-and-roll heavy offense.
Running the pick-and-roll, or using any kind of high ball screen, was a very crucial component in Bates’ role in the Louisiana Tech offense. He lived, ate and slept in the pick-and-roll last year with nearly half of all his scoring attempts, and a similar percentage of his assists, coming in that simple action alone. In fact, Louisiana Tech’s offense the last two years has been built around point guards directing the offense and stacking assists. Two years ago, Sean Newman finished third nationally in assists per game and this past season Bates finished 24th.
Bates certainly looked to, and did, score out of these screening actions, but his passing is what made him so much more incredibly dangerous.
Put simply, Bates is an incredible passer, with both vision and capability. He keeps the ball out of harm’s way while managing to create with his passing. Last year, he had an assist percentage of 34.9 with a turnover percentage of only 15.9. That made him one of just 11 players in 2025-26 to have an assist percentage of at least 34 while being below the 16 percent threshold on turnovers.
Looking specifically at his passing in the pick-and-roll, we can see how he’s able to read and react to different types of coverages and exploit them as necessity dictates.
Here’s a clip where the defense plays drop coverage on a high pick-and-roll. Let’s watch and then rewind.
The defending big sits back to try and walk the line between not giving up an open driving lane to Bates or allowing an easy pass to the screener, Sir Isaac Herron (no, he’s not a Knight of the Realm in England, that’s just his name). Bates does an incredible job of manipulating the defense to create an open pass for an easy dunk. His first move after going around the screen was to hesitate, deliberately. This dragged his original defender back toward him in the thought that he could recover without having to potentially switch (granted, drop coverage seeks to avoid this switch anyway). But then Bates keeps the pressure on by attacking the dropping big. With both his original defender and the big gravitating to him, the pass to Herron for an open lob dunk materializes.
Next, here’s a case where Bates faced a hedge, where the defending center comes up high to pin Bates where he’s at.
The defending center and guard both get big to try and deter a pass to the roll man, but Bates finds the window. He didn’t wait or look to manipulate the defense further. Instead, he saw the open space his teammate, Kaden Cooper, already had in front of him. In the first clip, Bates had to manufacture some of the space for his teammate to fill. In this case, it was already there and Bates simply had to make the read and deliver the pass. In both cases, Bates read the defense well and executed his part in the scoring play to perfection.
These kinds of passes, along with plenty of other great reads, are found all over in Bates’ film. His vision covers the whole court. Just because there’s a ball screen in the main action doesn’t mean he’s not keeping eyes out for other players on the court that have an open look. This manifests in passes to cutters, players on the wing or a dump-off under the basket.
Now that we’ve seen all of the great passing in Bates’ repertoire, and the scoring he stacks on top of it, let’s now examine the elephant in the room that threatens to hamstring Bates in his ability to be a Pac-12 caliber point guard.
AJ Bates has horrible shooting percentages. He’s a woefully inefficient scorer through two years of his collegiate career. Just 38.4% overall and 28.7% from three.
Setting aside how missing too many shots is a problem in and of itself, the best pick-and-roll passers, heck, many of the best passers in general, still need to be competent scorers. They don’t need to be volume scorers, but they must still be a threat. John Stockton, Steven Nash, Jason Kidd and the like may have been seen as pass-first point guards, but they weren’t pass-always. Each of them still had their own scoring highlight reels.
Players who can’t score can struggle to find open passes because offense can turn into 4-on-5. Aggie fans can look at Jordy Barnes as a recent example of this very issue. He was the best passer on the roster both years he was in a Utah State uniform, but couldn’t fully utilize those skills because he couldn’t, threaten defenses with his own scoring.
The most simple answer to this problem is to assume that Bates isn’t a good shooter, shrug your shoulders and just kind of deal with it going forward. That’s far from an illogical conclusion and to be perfectly blunt it’s probably the most likely explanation. Though there are hints of Bates’ true potential scattered around his career and buried under the surface-level stats.
The first place to look is Bates’ high school career. If he’s always been a bad shooter, it would show up there. Except he surpassed 2,000 points as a high schooler playing 6A ball in Texas. And while his shooting percentages aren’t publicly available, one Houston Chronicle article mentions Bates was shooting 54% for the season (as of the 31st game in what was a 39-game season for Bates). It’s not “I rest my case” evidence, but it’s pretty solid circumstantial stuff.
Finding potential for an immediate jump, or a return to previous form, in shooting percentages isn’t simple, but there are a few places to look. The first is to check a player’s shot quality. Players to take an excessive number of high-difficulty shots are naturally going to have lower percentages, barring an absurd scoring ability.
Synergy Sports uses an analytics-driven process to sort field goal attempts into different tiers of “shot quality.” The three tiers being creatively named low, medium and high. An example of a low shot quality field goal attempt would be a highly contested shot or an isolation step-back mid-range jumper. A high shot quality attempt would be something like an open layup or a wide open three.
Using this criteria to sift through Bates’ diet of shot attempts, we find that he had one of the most difficult shot distributions of any player in college basketball last year. Out of around 3,500 qualified Division I basketball players for each of these categories, Bates ranked 3,104th in percentage of attempts that were considered high shot quality, 2,476th in medium shot quality and 65th in low shot quality.
There are players that can score efficiently on that kind of shot quality distribution. Kingston Flemings, AJ Dybantsa and Darius Acuff all had more high-difficulty shots to their name than Bates, and all were efficient scorers. But you’ll also notice that all three are going to be top 10 picks in this upcoming NBA Draft.
Mid-major teams don’t live on bringing in guys capable of this level of scoring dominance. They find guys that thrive on easier shot diets and craft offenses that deliver less difficult shots. Mason Falslev and MJ Collins both ranked inside the top 270 in number of medium shot quality attempts and Collins ranked inside the top 250 in high shot quality attempts. Just as importantly, they both ranked relatively low (low being a good thing in this case) in the percentage of their attempts that fell into the low shot quality attempt range, Falslev ranking 994th and Collins 1,420th.
If we’re looking at factors that will help Bates improved his poor shooting percentages, moving him into an offense where he’ll face less demand for difficult shots is going to do him more good than just telling him to spend more time in the gym. Taking easier shots is going to inherently raise his percentages and give him confidence, which is important because he needs that confidence for his other shots.
Having such low shooting percentages saps confidence and can turn good shooters into really bad ones. Bates still shot poorly even in his higher quality field goal attempts. And while there’s an argument that perhaps that just shows he’s a bad shooter, nobody is shooting in a vacuum. Every attempt Bates takes comes in the context of him usually having already missed several other shots. Every miss has the chance to stick in his mind and impact the next shot.
Confidence is enormously important. You can see it in a small pocket of last season where he scored 27+ points three times in a four-game span — 34 at Liberty, 29 against Middle Tennessee in the conference tournament and then 27 in the next game against Missouri State. Bates shot 48% in these three games, both overall and from three. In late November/early December, Bates had another spike in confidence, shooting 61% over a five-game span and averaging 17.2 points.
Is Bates going to turn into a 50/40/90 shooter just because of being in a better offense and getting more confidence? No. There’s a level of responsibility that needs to be levied onto Bates about his shooting. We’ve outlined reasons that can explain some of his inefficiencies, but at the end of the day, he’s the one with the ball in his hands. He’s the one making the decision to shoot in less-than-ideal situations. Basketball is a make or miss game and Bates is simply missing his shots too often. He’ll either have to make them or someone else that can will step in and do it for him.
But a little confidence and a better fit are still going to help.
Fit with Utah State
In previous analysis of both Jacobson’s offensive scheme and two other newcomers, Will Hornseth and Sean Felts, it’s becoming pretty obvious that bringing in strong players who are strong in the pick-and-roll is a major emphasis. Other newcomers that have and will be analyzed fall more into the role of a receiver in these schemes. Bates is a creator that will direct the symphony of Jacobson’s offense and provide connecting passes to all of the scorers and pieces of this offense.
There are a fair amount of similarities between Bates and Jacobson’s most recent point guard, Trey Campbell. Both are off-the-bounce creators that create space for shots, including the midrange. There’s a pretty short bridge between what Bates was doing at Louisiana Tech and the types of actions he’ll be involved in at Northern Iowa. Bates ran an absurd number of high pick-and-roll actions, some of which will continue. Though he’ll also spend plenty of time running five-out delay actions that will be producing similar opportunities to pass.
These plays will also leave ample opportunity to score. Just imagine Campbell (No. 4) in these plays swapped out for Bates (and also one play with No. 35, Leon Bond), recalling the craft he used to score from clips in the previous section.
We can also draw back on this clip first showcased in the breakdown of Jacobson’s offense and see how well Bates’ style fits in, given the ample opportunities to either pass to a rolling big or simply score the basket himself.
Bates is almost certainly going to lead Utah State in assists, but there’s a fairly decent chance that Bates is the second-leading scorer for the Aggies, and even better odds he’s in the top three. His shooting volume should go down, but with the ample number of times he’ll be operating in a two-man game at the top of the arc, Bates is going to have chances to score.
