Ace Reiser became the fifth member of Utah State’s 2026 transfer portal recruiting class, joining the Aggies after spending his freshman season at the College of Southern Idaho. In that lone year, Reiser accomplished quite a bit. He helped lead CSI to a national runner-up finish and, for his individual efforts, earned JUCO All-American honors.
Despite the recent narrative that junior college recruits are of higher quality, due in part to chaos around changing eligibility and the COVID years given to players, Utah State hasn’t drawn (directly) from the JUCO ranks much in the last few years. Only one player has come directly to Logan from a junior college team in the last six years. That was Kalifa Sakho, who came to USU from South Plains College to play under Danny Sprinkle. Before that, Craig Smith brought on guys like Kuba Karwowski and Alphonso Anderson to be role players for the team.
Let’s dive into what helped make Reiser one of the few (though now more common under first-year head coach Ben Jacobson) exceptions to Utah State’s lack of direct JUCO recruiting.
Biographical Info/Stats
- Height: 6’0″
- Weight: 165 lbs
- Class: Sophomore (3 years of eligibility)
- Hometown: South Jordan, UT
- High School: Alta (Utah)
- Previous College: College of Southern Idaho
Ace Reiser Career Per-Game Averages
| Season | Team | GP / GS | Points | Rebounds | Assists | Steals | Blocks | FG% | 3P% | FT% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-26 | College of Southern Idaho | 37 / 37 | 14.7 | 5.4 | 4.1 | 2.4 | 0.2 | 49.6 | 44.8 | 78.2 |
Scouting Report
Strengths
- Elite 3-point shooter
- Strong ball-handler
- Good court vision
- Tough rebounder for size
Weaknesses
- Slower shooting motion
- Size limits defensive ceiling and rim finishing
Ace Reiser fits, almost too well, the stereotype of that guy at the local rec center who doesn’t look like a threat, but he’s actually the best player in the pickup group. He’s undersized, but manages to get rebounds over guys half a foot taller than him. You think his size makes him easy to score on, but you actually find it difficult to do so. He’s also got an odd-looking shooting form, but it goes in anyway. And he never seems to run out of energy.
He’s the kind of guy that the TV broadcasters will call “scrappy” or “sneaky quick” with a “good basketball IQ” and all the good 1990s coaching lingo.
But let’s actually get into the things that make Reiser such a promising point guard prospect, and we’ll start with the thing that makes Reiser most dangerous: his 3-point shooting.
Despite having a shooting form that looks like he fished it directly out of the uncanny valley, Reiser just hits 3-pointers and makes it look easy. His motion is a bit longer than you’d like, but the usual assumption that it makes hitting contested threes harder doesn’t really seem to apply to Reiser. He still hits them anyway, even under tight contests.
We went over this in the previous newcomer breakdown with Solomon Callaghan, but it’s worth pointing out again. Shooting a high 3-point percentage is good. Shooting a high 3-point percentage on high volume is very, very good. And while Reiser’s 4.4 attempts per game falls short of Callaghan’s average of 5.4, Reiser elevates himself with a pretty insane 44.8 shooting percentage. That’s not an easy mark to hit on any sort of consistent volume. But by the end of the year, Reiser was still shooting at percentages in the 40s and 50s. He did this all while regularly taking more difficult attempts, and despite playing the top competition in the NJCAA by that stage of the season.
This level of 3-point shooting creates some pretty absurd gravity on the perimeter and in ball-screen actions. Even good shooters will have their defenders help off of them at times. Nobody helps off Reiser, and the space created by this aided his teammates in getting to the basket.
Aside from the spacing he creates for others, this shooting gives Reiser plenty to play with when it’s his turn with the rock. In having defenders playing so close to him, Reiser utilizes his quick first step to blow by defenders to get into the paint.
What happens when Reiser gets to the paint is a bit of a mixed bag, though.
What Reiser can and can’t do in the paint amounts to what his biggest weakness is. Standing at 6-foot-even, and lacking the vertical leap of a demigod some of his contemporaries are blessed with, Reiser is held back in that he can’t be a threat to score at the rim. Of the five games I charted shot types for, which were largely centered on games where Reiser was playing the top JUCO competition and/or in the NJCAA Tournament, he attempted only six layups in the half-court.
The majority of instances where he drove into the paint ended with a mid-range shot or a kick-out pass.
Easily the most egregious example of Reiser not being that aggressive in attacking the rim was this play, where he passed up what would have likely been a lightly contested layup in favor of a dump-off pass.
There is an undeniable limitation on Reiser’s ability to make things happen when he gets to the paint. Despite those limitations, there’s a lot he can still create by driving into the key. He may not be a huge threat to finish over help defense. But that help defense is still going to collapse into the paint. They can’t just ignore him. And that’s where Reiser can still be a problem.
When the defense inevitably collapses to stop Reiser, that’s where his point guard skills come into great effect. He’s not an elite passer, but his film shows that he possesses good court vision and that he’s very capable of delivering passes where they need to go. Reiser showed great ability to spray passes to the perimeter with a few dump-off passes in the paint mixed in. Not all of the shots in the following clips go in, but creating these high-quality shots with a simple dribble-drive is a pretty good recipe for success.
On top of all that, Reiser still has a way to score on these drives. He’s developing a solid scoring bag with floaters, runners, fadeaways and a deft use of his pivot foot. Reiser keeps himself under control in the vast majority of his drives, plays off two feet and makes good decisions. Sometimes that decision is a pass, as shown above. Other times, a shot attempt was the way to go.
This is the primary way in which shorter players are able to become scorers in the paint. Mason Falslev, even at a taller 6-foot-3, has evolved his game from finishing exclusively at the cup to adding a floater that helps him finish over traffic in cases where he’d otherwise have a layup blocked. And even though Reiser is several years younger, he’s got a really solid start to developing this part of his scoring package. He shot 11 of 24 (45.8%) on mid-range shots in the games I charted, a very respectable percentage.
Reiser’s height, along with weighing in at only 165 pounds, is something that drags on his defensive potential. However, he does a really good job of doing the best with what he’s got. Reiser may be undersized, but he doesn’t play undersized. His quickness keeps him in front of defenders, and he works hard to keep his man from getting an easy driving lane. The only issue he really runs into is that sometimes, weighing 165 pounds means some guys create separation through just brushing him aside.
One of the best ways that Reiser makes up for being undersized on defense is his elite hand-eye coordination. His ability to perfectly pick out the ball from a player’s hands and create a steal is incredible, as is his ability to read when and where passes are coming so he can cut in and swipe it away. Reiser averaged 2.4 steals per game, which included three games where he had six steals and another trio of games where he had five.
An underrated part of Reiser’s game, and still largely related to his defense that we’re going over, is how many rebounds he’s able to get. It’s not really normal for a 6-foot college guard to average north of five rebounds per game. I don’t have a way to quickly search this specifically for junior college players, but at the Division I level, there’s usually only about two or three players each year who are 6-foot or shorter and average at least five rebounds per game.
This rebounding should translate fairly well to D1, as most of it is Reiser being good at finding positioning for boards and good old-fashioned effort.
Fit with Utah State
With fellow point guard AJ Bates as one of the headliners for Utah State’s transfer class, being a starter is not going to be a likely outcome for Reiser this upcoming season. Just clearing the bar of a successful JUCO to D1 transition is enough of a challenge. No need to make starting as a sophomore on top of that part of Reiser’s expectations for year one in Logan.
Reiser looks to be a great fit as a spark plug scorer coming off the bench that will still be very capable of running the offense as a point guard. How many minutes Reiser will play is going to be dependent on how much of an offensive threat he’s able to make of himself, and how well AJ Bates fits in with Jacobson’s offense, along with Bates’ own improvements.
In other words, if Bates is an all-conference guard, he’s likely playing 30-35 minutes per night, and that’s only going to leave 10-ish minutes for Reiser, less if Jacobson isn’t keen on dual-PG lineups.
What should probably be the most anticipated type of action the Aggies will run when Reiser is on the court is the perimeter handoffs. We’ve gone over these extensively in the Jacobson offensive breakdown and touched on them in other player breakdowns. Essentially, it’s where one of the bigs does a handoff, plus a screen.
For other players on the roster, this action is more about setting up a downhill driving lane or creating a two-man game with the screening big. For Reiser, that also applies to a degree, but aside from Callaghan, Reiser is the only one on the team who is a massive threat to shoot right from the handoff. Defenses will go under the screen when Bates or Falslev takes these handoffs. They’ll desperately chase and/or hedge Reiser, and that’s something that will create openings and chaos in the defense.
When AJ Green, formerly of Northern Iowa and currently with the Milwaukee Bucks, played under Jacobson, he constantly took these handoffs and turned them into quick 3-point attempts.
Reiser isn’t going to have the same green light as a two-time MVC Player of the Year, but this is the kind of situation where Jacobson may let Reiser have some freedom since he’s an elite shooter.
