Evans eager to bring his work ethic to Warriors
Jacob Evans III was playing video games at a friend’s house when he was told to evacuate.
It was August 2016, his first summer back home in Baton Rouge, La., since enrolling at the University of Cincinnati on a full basketball scholarship. With the neighborhood flooding, Evans helped his buddy’s family grab their important possessions before he walked two miles in waist-high water to his mother’s house.
“That kind of set in that you can lose everything in a couple minutes,” Evans, the 28th pick of last week’s NBA draft, said during his introductory news conference Monday at the Warriors’ practice facility. “I don’t take this game for granted. I’m blessed to have the body I have and play the game that I love, especially at a high level.”
It is that perspective, not just his 6-foot-9 wingspan or 35½inch vertical, that compelled Golden State to use its highest draft pick in six years on Evans. A do-everything wing who
led the Bearcats to a school record-tying 31 wins as a junior last season, Evans, 21, plays with a tenacity reminiscent of Draymond Green.
Unlike many of Thursday’s other draftees, who treated college as a one-year pit stop before cashing in on the NBA, Evans was an unheralded recruit who improved in each of his three seasons at Cincinnati. Though his jump shot remains a work in progress, he could command immediate playing time as a versatile defender for the Warriors.
In early February, while scouting the Bearcats’ 77-40 rout of UCF, Warriors general manager Bob Myers found himself enamored with Evans’ unyielding will. Though hobbled by a finger injury and held to three points on 1-for-5 shooting, Evans fought through screens, guarded multiple positions, corralled six rebounds and dished out four assists.
The rest of Golden State’s scouting department watched Evans play 10 or so times last season. After attending Evans’ group workout last Wednesday in Oakland, Green told Myers, “That guy knows how to play.” Little more than 24 hours later, when Golden State came on the clock for the No. 28 selection, everyone in the draft room already agreed: Evans would be their pick.
“With a guy like Jacob, he’s already shown that he wants to get better,” Myers said. “He’s going to be put in an environment where, when you’re surrounded by people who are high-achieving and hard-working, you can’t help but get caught up in that.”
After fielding questions Monday, Evans posed next to his new No. 10 Warriors jersey with his mother, two brothers and high school coach. It was those four people, collectively known to Evans as his “inner circle,” who instilled in him the drive that Myers first noticed four months ago.
Theresa Chatman-Evans worked 12-hour shifts as the director of a daycare to provide for Jacob and her two older sons, Demarquis and Devin. After she returned home most days at 7 p.m., Chatman-Evans barely had enough time to make dinner and help her boys with their homework.
With their mom working all day, Demarquis — seven years Jacob’s senior — assumed many of the day-to-day parenting duties. Demarquis took Jacob to school, picked him up from practice and made sure he spent free time working on his ball-handling.
“I’d say it’s unbelievable being here, but it’s also very believable because I knew he was going to end up in the NBA one day,” Demarquis said. “With the way he worked, there was no way he wasn’t going to get here eventually.”
Though Evans played high school basketball 13 miles east of LSU’s campus, the Tigers didn’t recruit him. Cincinnati head coach Mick Cronin made Evans a priority after watching him at a tournament in Las Vegas in 2014, seldom missing one of his AAU games. Months later, when Evans signed with the Bearcats, Cronin told him, “You can develop into a first-round pick.”
Within his first week on campus, Evans told Cincinnati’s director of strength and conditioning, Mike Rehfeldt, that he wanted to overhaul his body. It didn’t take long for Evans, who cut out soda and fried foods, to start adding muscle.
After averaging 8.4 points per game as a freshman, Evans visited home to relax and train. In mid-August, only a couple weeks before the start of his sophomore year, he was in Baton Rouge when flooding forced more than 11,000 Louisianians into state-operated shelters. Though his mother’s house was on high enough ground to avoid serious damage, he saw many of his friends lose their homes.
By the time he returned to campus, he was talking openly about trying to make the NBA. In his final two seasons, Evans helped lead the Bearcats to a cumulative 61-11 record as he played shooting guard, small forward and some point guard. In a switchheavy defensive system similar to Golden State’s, Evans guarded every position, even the post.
His first of two workouts with the Warriors was June 12, the day of the team’s championship parade. When he left his hotel in downtown Oakland, Evans pondered whatifs as he walked by hundreds of smiling fans in Golden State gear: “Man, it’d be cool to start my career with the champs.”
Last Thursday, when his manager called to tell him that the Warriors were drafting him, Evans thought it was a joke. Moments later, Steve Kerr chatted with Evans briefly on the phone before handing it to Green, who told him he liked his game and welcomed him to the team.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Evans said. “Being able to come to one of the greatest organizations ever, probably the greatest team ever in NBA history, I know I’ll be able to be a part of something that’s legendary.”