New Bulls GM Eversley relishes his time with Raptors, friendship with Ujiri

TORONTO – Masai Ujiri remembers crossing paths with Marc Eversley early in their professional careers.
 
This was more than 15 years ago, well before Ujiri became an NBA executive – let alone one of the top and most admired execs in sports – and before future colleague Eversley even got his start in the league.
 
Ujiri was working as an international scout for the Denver Nuggets. Eversley was the NBA player relationship manager at Nike.
 
“You saw him around, whether it was in Chicago for the [NBA Draft] Combine or at the [Nike] Hoop Summit or at other events,” Ujiri told TSN over the phone Friday evening. “You’d see him at games sometimes. I would see him and we were friendly but we became really close once I came to Toronto.”
 
A decade and a half later, the two remain close. They’re on opposing sides now – Ujiri as the president of the Raptors and Eversley, the recently hired general manager of the Bulls. They’ve each worked for different organizations and held multiple different positions over their individual journeys, but they both owe much of their success to the experience they shared in the Raptors’ front office.
 
Eversley was born in London, England, but his family relocated to Toronto when he was young. They eventually moved to Brampton, Ont., where he played ball at Cardinal Leger Secondary School. He started at Nike in 1995 and spent nearly a decade with the company – first as a store supervisor, then with Nike Canada and finally working for the head office in Oregon.
 
There, he learned valuable lessons and developed many skills that he would help him navigate the business of basketball. One of them was the importance of building and maintaining strong relationships.
 
“Building a relationship with [Steve Nash] through the federation, Canada Basketball, was critical to my penetration into the US market,” Eversley said on a conference call Friday afternoon. “At the time when I was working with Nike and working with the Toronto Raptors that’s when I got to meet Vince [Carter] and he and I became very close. I stood up for him at his wedding, [I’m] godfather to his daughter. Those are the types of things that relationships can do for you, can help move the needle. I remain very close with Vince today.”
 
In 2006, then-Raptors GM Bryan Colangelo hired Eversley to be part of his revamped front office in Toronto. A year later, Colangelo brought Ujiri over from Denver. Initially, Eversley was in player development. Ujiri was in scouting. However, it didn’t take long for their roles to intertwine.
 
Eversley didn’t have much experience in the business but he did possess many of the transferable skills he would need to excel at the job and was eager to develop them. He also wanted to learn from those around him. Ujiri, who came from a scouting background, was one of those mentors.
 
“At that time he was very willing to learn,” Ujiri said. “He came in under player development and before you know it he was travelling everywhere with me to go scout because he wanted to learn the scouting aspect of the game.”
 
“Masai’s been like a brother to me,” said Eversley. “He’s clearly one of the sharpest executives in all of sports right now. He really introduced me to the art of scouting and how to truly evaluate talent and I owe him for that.”
 
Both execs credit Colangelo, not only for giving them that initial opportunity but also for showing them the ropes and empowering them in their roles. It’s not a coincidence that there are Colangelo disciples thriving throughout the league today, including Ujiri and Eversley, as well as 76ers VP of basketball operations Alex Rucker and Raptors VP of basketball strategy Keith Boyarsky – who started in Toronto’s analytics department under the former Raps GM.
 
“Bryan is the guy who actually took a chance on me,” said Eversley. “When I first went to Toronto he really taught me what the NBA is all about. He taught me about the rhythm and the flow of what an NBA season looks like, what the playoffs look like. My time in Toronto was unbelievable. Here’s a kid who was 3,000 miles from home and got an opportunity to come home and work for his hometown club. Bryan gave me that opportunity and I’m forever indebted to him for that.”
 
“It was a cool setting and a cool boss to work for because he really opened it up to us,” Ujiri said. “It was almost like a tag team with Marc.”
 
Ujiri would return to Denver, where he got his first GM gig, before coming back to run the Raptors – a team he’s led to the playoffs in seven straight seasons. Eversley spent time with the Wizards before joining Colangelo in Philadelphia, where he held the position of senior VP of player personnel until getting the Bulls job this week.
 
Chicago officially announced the hiring of Eversley on Friday, making him the NBA’s only current Canadian GM and fourth in league history. He’ll have his hands full, working to get the Bulls back on track alongside his new boss, former Nuggets exec Arturas Karnisovas, who was also recently hired.
 
Karnisovas was watching "The Last Dance" – the popular doc series depicting the rise of Michael Jordan and Chicago’s final championship season in 1997-98 – on Sunday night when he called Eversley to let him know he got the job. Fittingly, that was the last season the Bulls went to The Finals. They’ve missed the playoffs in each of the last three seasons, going a combined 71-153 over that stretch.
 
Restoring one of the league’s most storied franchises to what it was won’t be easy and it certainly won’t happen overnight, but Ujiri is confident that Eversley is the man for the job.
 
“The one thing that I like about him is he’s a quick thinker but he’s also very calm,” Ujiri said. “In our business, you have to have such a high level of calmness to manage different situations and Marc has the highest level of that. He’s very, very smart and I think he’s got great presence, which will help him in his job. He’s inquisitive, smart, very calm and quick on his feet. I think all those things are going to help him in his new position, coupled with all of his experience now working with different organizations.”
 
“It’s very well deserved. He really put in the work. He’s somebody that I can really call a friend. I’m really, really proud of him. We’ve gone through so much. We worked together and went everywhere together for three or four years under Bryan and that was an incredible experience.”