LOS ANGELES — A.J. Dybantsa’s freshman year of college may be over, but his education is very much ongoing. On this cool, June gloomy morning in Los Angeles, class is in session inside the Burns Rec Center on the campus of Loyola Marymount University. The professor holding court is Davion Mitchell, a veteran guard with the Miami Heat who has a PhD in LLD (Locking Dudes Down).
At 6-feet-9, Dybantsa has a good nine inches on Mitchell, but the 27-year-old veteran has no problem cutting him down to size. Mitchell is a former National Defensive Player of the Year at Baylor, and he has used his muscle and guile to earn a nice paycheck in the NBA. Those assets are proving problematic for the 19-year-old Dybantsa, whose dribble drives against Mitchell are frequently disrupted by the veteran’s quick hands. When Dybantsa does maintain control of the ball, Mitchell forces him into taking awkward, off-balance attempts, more than a few of which clang harmlessly off the rim.
When the hourlong workout is done, Mitchell huddles with his pupil astride the foul line. “You gotta get to your spot,” he says. “Out there, you can’t do anything with me. You’re locked up. As soon as you put the ball down, I’m in your pocket.”
Mitchell turns around and points to a spot about 10 feet from the rim. “You get there, there’s nothing I can do,” he said. After a few more words, Mitchell adds, “You’ll learn over time. You’ll have so many reps, it becomes second nature.”
It is generous of Mitchell to pass along nuggets that Dybantsa might someday use against him in an NBA game. For his part, Dybantsa is neither rattled nor discouraged. “I just played against one of the best defensive guards in the Eastern Conference, and I only won one game,” he says. “You gotta love those growing pains.”
Dybantsa’s love of the grind is a big reason why he is widely expected to be the number one pick when the NBA Draft takes place on June 23 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. Dybantsa entered his freshman season at BYU under enormous hype and proceeded to exceed it. Despite facing constant double and triple teams from opposing defenses, he led the nation in scoring at 25.5 points per game to go along with 6.8 rebounds, 3.7 assists and 1.1 steals. He shot 51 percent from the floor and 77.4 percent from the foul line. If there are nits to pick, it would be with his three-point shooting (33.1 percent) and ball security (3.1 turnovers per game). Both of those can be improved with enough repetitions. As Dybantsa’s predraft work habits show, there is no doubt he will get plenty of those.
The Washington Wizards own the top pick, but there is some speculation that the Utah Jazz, Dybantsa’s home-away-from-home team, will pull off a trade to move up. Dybantsa doesn’t much care where he ends up, but he has made clear that going first is important. “I’ve been number one since I was in ninth grade,” he says. “I haven’t dropped yet, so I don’t plan on dropping in the NBA Draft.”
Fulfilling that goal is one of many reasons why Dybantsa is so intentional about his predraft preparation. The gym at LMU has hosted plenty of five-on-five pickup games with NBA players and prospects, but this morning the gathering inside the gym is small. Besides Mitchell, it includes Kentucky forward Zoom Diallo, A.J.’s former high school teammate; his trainer, Zack Gonzales; videographer Michael Ojo, who is gathering footage for a documentary; a trainer from the Red Bull Athletic Performance Center, who helps Dybantsa with his pre- and post-workout stretching; and his father, Ace, who is living with A.J. in their rented home in Venice.
The most notable thing about the group is who is not here. Or rather, what is not here: a certified NBA agent. That role is being filled by Ace, and his logic is simple. NBA rookie contracts have predetermined terms that are set by the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the league and the players’ union. The way Ace sees it, the only thing an agent can do is collect a three percent commission. “He doesn’t need someone to negotiate for him when he’s the top dog,” Ace says. “The numbers are there. Everybody knows what he’s going to be making. If you don’t know, Google it. So why should I hire someone to tell me what I already know?”
A.J.’s trainer Zack Gonzales offers encouragement after a drill
Gonzales has been working with A.J. on his game but has also encouraged him to relax and have fun off the court as well
For Dybantsa to take the next step as a pro, he needs to improve on his 33 percent three-point shooting from BYU
Dybantsa has worked to improve his ball security and three-point shooting
Dybantsa already has an NBA-level dunk package
Ever since A.J. exploded onto the basketball scene as a young teenager in Massachusetts, Ace has had a heavy hand in all of his business decisions, from where he played to how much he got paid. A.J. is happy to let his father take care of those details so he can keep the main thing the main thing. “He just had the most unconditional love for me since I was born,” he says. “He just really wanted me to focus on basketball and books, so he took in that role to try to protect me and learn the business, so we don’t have to rely on somebody else.”
Even if A.J. wasn’t crazy about the plan, he wouldn’t have much choice but to go along with it. “I told him a thousand times, just because you know how to dunk the ball doesn’t mean that you’re smarter than me,” Ace says. But there is also no question that the dynamic has worked well to this point. The draft will be a big moment, but there will be plenty more to come. “Clearly,” A.J. says, “we’re doing something right.”
A boy learns to heed authority when he’s raised by a dad who was a police officer for 19 years. Ace was born in The Republic of Congo before he moved to Paris as a teenager, and then to the U.S. as a young adult. His wife Chelsea hails from Jamaica. A.J. is a middle child sandwiched between two sisters. The three of them were raised in a strict household that reflected the cultures where their parents grew up. “He would never raise his voice to me. He knows better,” Ace says. “That’s that way I was raised. I never raised my voice to my dad or my mom, so why should you raise your voice to me?”
That does not mean, however, that Ace was one of those hard-driving crazy sports dads. A.J.’s dogged pursuit of basketball has been entirely self-motivated. “He told me in sixth grade he wants to play in the NBA,” Ace says. “I’m like, stop dreaming. Do you know how many players are in the NBA? My goal for my son was to get a scholarship so I don’t have to pay for college. His goal was to be a pro.”
Ace realized the extent of his son’s commitment during the Covid-19 pandemic. The only available workout space was a 90-minute drive away in Middletown, Rhode Island. They made that back-and-forth trek every day. A.J. was still in middle school at the time, and it wasn’t easy for him to go up against high school seniors who were Division I prospects. Yet, he always came back for more. “They beat him up. He used to cry,” Ace says. “He didn’t realize that was part of the process.”
A.J. played his freshman season at Saint Sebastian’s School in Needham, Mass. After he was named the state’s Gatorade Player of the Year, the family decided he needed to upgrade his competition. “He outgrew the entire state,” Ace says. They went 3,000 miles away to Prolific Prep in Napa, California, where A.J. played for two years alongside some of the nation’s top recruits.
Heading into A.J.’s senior year, he had an opportunity to join Utah Prep, which had been created the year before in hopes of competing with other powerhouse basketball programs. It was a lucrative opportunity for the family that included an ownership stake in the school. Ace decided he needed outside help to negotiate the deal. By this time, all the national recruiting rankings had A.J. near or at the top his class, and he was moving in elite basketball circles. That included Shaquille O’Neal, who connected the family with his longtime marketing agent Leonard Armato. “One day I got a phone call from Shaq. He goes, ‘You need to meet this family. This guy reminds me of my dad, and the kid is great. He’s gonna call you in a minute,’ ” Armato says. “Next thing I know, I get a call from Ace. We started to talk and ultimately we decided to work together.”
When it was time to choose a college, the family was ready to cash in again, an option made possible by the NCAA’s new pay-for-play rules. Still, Ace insists that while money was an important factor, it wasn’t the only one. He and Armato decided what their minimum price would be, and then they asked seven schools if they were prepared to meet it. “Five out of the seven had what we asked for,” Ace says. “The other two had more.”
They visited all seven. Ace told A.J. to pick the one he liked best. “I did not tell him the money part, because we didn’t want the decision to be based on money,” he says. “I told him, pick the school that you like. You tell me why. If I agree, you can go.”
A.J. eventually settled on BYU, and he broke down his reasoning to his dad. The Cougars had a pro-style coach in Kevin Young, who spent eight seasons as an assistant coach with the Philadelphia 76ers and Phoenix Suns. Ace was impressed that A.J. did his homework, which included speaking to players like Kevin Durant (A.J.’s hero) and Chris Paul, who played for Young in Phoenix and vouched for him. The reported price tag at BYU was north of $5 million. Ace says they could have made more at some other schools.
The family has been similarly cagey about managing A.J.’s marketing relationships. He currently has three main corporate partners: Nike, Red Bull and Fanatics. The Nike deal was especially significant because the company agreed to develop a logo and let the family own the intellectual property. A.J. already has his own foundation, which has undertaken efforts to provide supplies, equipment, goods and academic support to The Congo and Jamaica as well as his native town of Brockton, Mass. (When A.J. made the wholly unsurprising announcement that he was entering the NBA Draft, he did it in Brockton at the elementary school he once attended.) The foundation was created after he visited Jamaica in the spring of 2025.
“You have to be really strategic in the way that you position someone like A.J.,” Armato says. “He has tremendous core values. You can hear it in the way he talks. He talks about God, he talks about family, he talks about giving back. He’s also a really cool kid, so he’s aspirational both in the way he looks and also in the way he plays. So that gives you a lot of latitude to do things. We just want to be really intentional and really careful.”
Knowing his father has the business side well in hand, A.J. has been able to lock into his predraft workouts with Gonzales, a former walk-on guard at Oregon who has worked for several years as an NBA development coach, including a stint with the Los Angeles Lakers. Gonzales and A.J. bonded two years ago when they met at the Nike Hoop Summit. Last year, Gonzales trained another BYU prodigy, Egor Demin, whose much improved jump shot following the season helped lift him into the lottery.
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Gonzales has been working with A.J. on becoming a more complete player on both ends — he noted early on that Dybantsa only had 12 blocks — but a major focus has been on improving Dybantsa’s jump shot. “The idea is to create shot fluidity, so it’s not a two-shot motion,” Gonzales says. “It’s about quality, not quantity. We’re not going to shoot a thousand shots because he’ll get tired and start building bad habits. Better to shoot 200 or 250 quality shots and really build this thing up. I told him, this is gonna be a two-year process. We’re gonna build this thing the right way. I need you to trust me.”
Los Angeles might have served as the backdrop for the iconic HBO series “Entourage,” but Dybantsa barely has any friends in town, much less anything resembling a posse. The house the Dybantsas rented in Venice is just a few steps from Abbot Kinney Boulevard, a happening strip with lots of restaurants, stores and a distinct hippie vibe. But Dybantsa has spent very little time there because he is too easily recognized. He has gone to a couple of music shows and played a little golf, but mostly, he says, “I stay in the house.”
Gonzales has made an effort not just to work out with A.J. and break down video, but to encourage him to see the world beyond those four lines. That includes taking him and Ojo to the movies, just to get him out of the house. “He has had this pro approach since eighth grade,” Gonzales says. “I love that he doesn’t smoke, drink, party, anything like that, but at the same time, I really want him to know that it’s okay to have fun. That’s not going to take away from basketball.”
All of this is not to say that Dybantsa has been all work and no play. He spent the first week of June in Paris doing appearances for a marketing agency and checking out the action at Roland Garros. Lately he has been working for the NBA as a “player correspodent” during the Finals, where he can heard asking questions of Harrison Barnes and Victor Wembenyama alongside the other members of the assembled media. He has done a handful of longform podcast interviews, mostly notably “All the Smoke” with Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson. On June 16, A.J. and his family will set up camp in New York and spend the week there leading up to the draft.
Once Dybantsa heads to his new home city, which will presumably be Washington, D.C., his father will travel along with him. Ace plans to live with A.J. until ready to live on his own. “I’m not leaving my baby alone,” Ace says. “He’s always gonna be a baby to me. The other day he said to me, you think I’m big enough now? I say not big enough to kick my ass. I’m going to live with him or nearby until he’s grown enough to take care of himself. Then my wife and I will move south. There’s no timetable, but I’ll know when it’s time. He won’t have to kick me out. I’m gonna leave on my own.”
Dybantsa has also made clear that he intends to get his degree from BYU. Not only that, but he says he will do so within the standard four-year window. “If I lock in, I could get it done in like two-and-a-half years, but I’m going to give myself four years,” he says. “I gotta get used to the NBA first, get used to the travel and everything, but I’ll be good. My mom said she wanted me to graduate, so I told her I would do it.”
A.J. is a man of few words, but when he says he’s going to do something, he usually follows through. Draft night will mark an important moment in his journey, but it will only signify the start of his basketball education. If his past is any indication of the future, it’s only a matter of time before he’s taking the old pros to school.
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