For two years, Utah had a front-row seat to one of the best young basketball players on the planet. AJ Dybantsa played his senior year of high school in Hurricane, tore up the college game for a season in Provo, and turned Brigham Young into appointment television for NBA scouts. By the time he walked across the draft stage in June, he had become something rare in this state: a genuine basketball phenomenon who belonged, at least for a while, to Utah.
And then, on draft night, Utah lost him — and gained the one player who had shadowed his entire rise.
When the Washington Wizards took Dybantsa with the No. 1 overall pick in the 2026 NBA Draft, and the Utah Jazz followed one pick later by selecting Kansas guard Darryn Peterson at No. 2, it set up a strange and slightly bittersweet situation for anyone in Provo or the rest of the state who had spent the last two years watching Dybantsa up close. The player Utah adopted is gone to Washington. The player who was his rival at every level — high school, college, and the race for the No. 1 pick — now wears the home team's colors.
If you're a BYU fan, a Jazz fan, or both, that's a genuinely complicated thing to sort out. Here's how it happened, and why it leaves so many Utah fans pulled in two directions.
The Player Utah Adopted
Start with why Dybantsa matters here at all.
He isn't from Utah. He grew up in Brockton, Massachusetts, the son of parents from Jamaica and the Republic of Congo, and he carries the full name Anicet François Dybantsa Jr. — the name he asked to be announced under on draft night, in tribute to his father. But his path to the NBA ran straight through this state, twice.
First came Utah Prep in Hurricane, where Dybantsa played his final high school season as the consensus No. 1 recruit in the country. Then came the decision that made him a household name in Provo: choosing BYU for his one year of college basketball, over blue-blood programs like North Carolina and Kansas. He picked the Cougars in large part because of head coach Kevin Young's NBA background and the pro-style infrastructure BYU built around him, and in doing so became the most anticipated recruit the program had ever landed.
He delivered. In a single season in Provo, the 6-foot-9 Dybantsa led the entire nation in scoring, averaging 25.5 points a game on 51% shooting to go with nearly seven rebounds and close to four assists. He broke a BYU freshman scoring record that had belonged to Danny Ainge for 48 years, dropping 43 points in a rivalry game against Utah. In the Big 12 Tournament, he scored 93 points across three games — enough to break the conference tournament scoring record Kevin Durant had set back in 2007. He won the Julius Erving Award as the best small forward in college basketball, and when he went first overall, he became the first player in BYU history to be the No. 1 pick in an NBA Draft.
For a state where basketball is often the fourth or fifth conversation behind football, skiing, and the Jazz, that season was a big deal. Provo, in particular, treated him like one of its own — because for that year, he was.
Enter Darryn Peterson
You cannot tell the story of Dybantsa's rise without Darryn Peterson, because for two years they climbed the same ladder, one rung apart.
Peterson, a 6-foot-6 guard out of national powerhouse Prolific Prep in California, was Dybantsa's mirror image in the recruiting rankings — sometimes just behind him, sometimes just ahead. The two spent the better part of two years trading the No. 1 spot in the 2025 class depending on which service you trusted. Dybantsa, who reclassified up from 2026 to 2025 to reach the NBA a year sooner, held the composite top ranking; Peterson topped some individual boards outright. It was, for a long time, a two-man race.
And the two of them didn't just coexist in the rankings — they played some of the most talked-about high school games in recent memory.
The signature one came in February 2025, in an Atlanta showcase, when Peterson's Prolific Prep edged Dybantsa's Utah Prep 88-86. The two combined for a staggering 107 points — Peterson pouring in a monster night capped by a game-winning three in the final second, Dybantsa answering with 49 of his own. The clip has been watched hundreds of thousands of times, and scouts and coaches still bring it up as one of the great individual duels the grassroots circuit has produced. They'd met earlier that season too, in December, with Peterson's team again coming out ahead.
There's a wrinkle that makes it even better: Dybantsa had previously played at Prolific Prep himself, before transferring to Utah Prep. So when Utah Prep and Prolific met, Dybantsa was facing his old school — now led by the rival who would trail him all the way to the top of the draft. (They never actually shared a Prolific roster; their time there didn't overlap.)
They also faced off in the McDonald's All-American Game, where Peterson scored 18 and shared co-MVP honors, while Dybantsa added 13. And in a detail that complicates the "rivals" label in the best way: the two are genuinely friendly off the court, having won a gold medal together on the same USA U16 team back in 2023 — a squad that went undefeated and won its games by an absurd average margin. They respect each other. They just happen to have spent their whole young careers being measured against one another.
The One College Showdown
When Dybantsa chose BYU and Peterson signed with Kansas, the rivalry gained a new and irresistible layer: both landed in the Big 12. For a fan base, that's a gift — two of the best prospects in years, in the same conference, on a collision course.
There was a catch. The Big 12's expansion to 16 teams killed the old double round-robin, which meant Dybantsa and Peterson were guaranteed to meet only once in the regular season: January 31, 2026, at Kansas's Allen Fieldhouse, in a game that happened to be the 1,000th ever played in that historic building. ESPN's College GameDay set up shop outside. Kansas students camped for seats. Dozens of NBA scouts packed in to watch the two players most of them expected to draft in the top two picks.
The game itself became a lesson in how these things rarely go according to script. Peterson came out unguardable, scoring nine of Kansas's first 12 points and looking every bit the No. 1 prospect, on his way to 18 points in the first half. Dybantsa, by contrast, struggled to get going — he didn't attempt a shot until the midpoint of the first half, and Kansas raced to a 20-point halftime lead behind a barrage of three-pointers. Then Peterson, whose one college season was defined as much by injuries as by brilliance, exited a few minutes into the second half with leg cramps and didn't return.
With the marquee duel effectively over, a different Cougar stole the show: senior guard Richie Saunders erupted for a career-high 33 points, 24 of them after halftime, dragging BYU all the way back to within six before Kansas held on. The final was Kansas 90, BYU 82. Dybantsa finished with 17 points on 6-of-12 shooting, a quiet night by his standards, made quieter by a Kansas crowd that chanted "overrated" when he stepped to the free-throw line.
So in the one time the two rivals met in college, Peterson's team won, and Peterson himself outplayed Dybantsa in the minutes he was on the floor — even if injuries meant neither delivered the fireworks the hype promised. It was, in miniature, the whole shape of their college seasons: Dybantsa the relentless, durable, nation-leading scorer; Peterson the dazzling talent whose availability, not his ability, was the open question.
Draft Night, and the Debate That Finally Ended
For more than a year, "Dybantsa or Peterson at No. 1?" was one of the most argued questions in basketball. Peterson entered the college season as the projected top pick. But injuries limited him to a handful of games at Kansas — he missed roughly a third of the season with hamstring, calf, and ankle problems — while Dybantsa played nearly every night and led the country in scoring. By June, Dybantsa had passed him in the consensus.
The Wizards made it official, taking Dybantsa first — the rare top pick who lands on a team with veteran talent already in place, alongside established stars in Washington's rebuild. He's drawn comparisons to Kevin Durant (his favorite player), Tracy McGrady, and Paul George, and he became the first player to both lead Division I in scoring and go No. 1 overall since Glenn Robinson in 1994.
Peterson didn't wait long. The Jazz took him second — one of the highest draft picks in franchise history, and only the second time Utah has ever picked second overall (the last was Darrell Griffith in 1980). Scouts still love his game: a smooth, positionally big scoring guard with a long wingspan and real defensive chops, the kind of prospect some evaluators compared to Hall of Famers before the injuries. He joins a Jazz roster that's quietly stacked with young talent and veterans alike, and slots in as a potential backcourt cornerstone for years.
Which brings us to the part that stings a little in Utah.
Why Utah Is Caught in the Middle
Here's the knot at the center of all this.
The Jazz wanted Dybantsa. That's not speculation dressed up as fact — it's the widely reported backdrop to the entire draft. Jazz owner Ryan Smith is a BYU graduate and one of the university's most prominent supporters, and the idea of keeping the state's adopted superstar in a Jazz uniform was, understandably, appealing. Utah held the No. 2 pick and was one of only two teams Dybantsa even met with during the pre-draft process; there was open speculation the Jazz might try to trade up to No. 1 to grab him. In a slightly different universe, Dybantsa is a Jazzman, and Provo throws a parade.
Instead, Washington took him first, and the Jazz pivoted to the next player on the board — who just happened to be the rival Dybantsa had been beating out (or trading blows with) since they were teenagers. Utah's consolation prize for missing on its adopted hero was his archrival.
If you've followed Dybantsa's Utah years, sit with how strange that is. The player Provo spent a season falling in love with now plays 2,000 miles away, for a franchise most Utah fans have no particular attachment to. And the player who beat his Kansas team on that January night in Lawrence — who outdueled him in high school, who chanted-crowd overrated night notwithstanding got the better of him in college — is now the face of the future for the state's own NBA team.
So what is a Utah basketball fan supposed to feel?
For a lot of people, the honest answer is: both things at once, and they don't fit together cleanly.
There's the pull to keep rooting for Dybantsa. You watched him grow up here. You watched him break Danny Ainge's record and outscore Kevin Durant's tournament mark. He earned a permanent place in BYU lore and a real one in the broader Utah sports memory. Cheering for him doesn't stop just because he wears a different jersey — plenty of Cougar fans will now quietly track every Wizards box score, the way you follow a kid who moved away.
And there's the pull to embrace Peterson. He's ours now, in the way that matters most day to day — he'll be at the Delta Center forty-plus nights a year, and the Jazz's ceiling for the next decade may rest partly on how good he becomes. Loyalty to the home team is real, and the fastest way to win over a fan base is to be great in its colors. If Peterson turns into the star scouts think he can be, Utah won't spend long mourning the guy who got away.
The friction is that those two loyalties were, for years, defined against each other. You can't fully separate "I love AJ" from "AJ vs. Peterson," because that rivalry is a big part of what made Dybantsa's story compelling in the first place. For BYU fans especially, there's a specific sting in watching the Jazz — a franchise owned by a BYU man — build around the player whose Kansas team beat the Cougars in the rivals' one college meeting.
The Silver Lining
If you want the optimistic read, and there's a good one, it's this: Utah didn't lose the rivalry. Utah gets to keep watching it — just in the NBA now, and for a lot longer than one college season ever could have offered.
Dybantsa and Peterson are both, by the consensus of the people who evaluate this for a living, potential franchise-level players. That means the "Dybantsa vs. Peterson" argument that consumed two years of high school and college basketball doesn't end — it graduates. It becomes a Wizards-Jazz subplot that could run for a decade, with two or three head-to-head meetings every single season. Every time Washington visits the Delta Center, the state gets its adopted son back for a night, in a building that will almost certainly give him an enormous ovation. Every time the two share a floor, the old rankings-board debate reignites with real NBA stakes attached.
For a state that spent two years lucky enough to host one half of the best young rivalry in basketball, that's not a bad consolation. Utah fans don't have to choose, exactly. They can love what Dybantsa was here, root for what Peterson becomes here, and enjoy a rivalry that — improbably — is now partly Utah's to keep.
It's just going to feel a little divided for a while. And in Provo, where the AJ Dybantsa era at BYU is still fresh enough to touch, it's going to feel that way most of all.
For more on Cougar sports and what's happening around Provo this fall, see our BYU football 2026 season preview, our BYU football game day guide, and the Provo events calendar.