Corey Evans
speaker
42 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Corey Evans’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I didn't understand why we were digging so much as far as the person and the character and who's around the person. And that has been transformational for me moving ahead is, you know, Oklahoma city is not LA. It's not Miami. It's not New York. So the right person has to be in mind before the right player has to be in mind. So how does the person tick who's behind them?
What's his, why does he care about winning? What's his habits? Is it a two parent household or is there an accountability figure behind him that he you know, when shit comes at him, how is he going to respond? Is it the first time in his life that he's being held accountable? And in the NBA, that's the first time you're going through that. It's going to be hard to succeed.
You know, Ryan, ultimately, I'd like to get back to an NBA front office as a GM. So it was a matter of is this before all else making this move? Will it educate me? Is it apples to apples or apples to oranges? Right. I don't know that right now. I'm a few weeks in and shit is flying everywhere. So, but the most important thing was I've always been a person that does not want I want to grow.
I want to learn. But most of all, I want to impact people's lives for the better. And that's the coaches, the support staff, and the players themselves. And I knew making this jump, the scouting life is not the easiest in the world. It's very lonely at times. Rightfully so. You're doing 200 days on the road. To be a part of
of the fabric of a team directly was the one thing that I was most looking forward to. And Cincinnati has all the resources, has all the right people in place. It was a matter of, can I come in and help these people out, alleviate some of the excess BS that has kind of added up over the past few years on these coaches' laps, and help be that switch to propel them from
We're turning down players that in Oklahoma City I was all about. Let's get this guy. Let's get this guy on our draft board. We need guys that are going to win right now. That was the hardest jump for me from high school to the NBA or college to the NBA was
looking five years down the road or six years down the road, when you're in the NBA and you're evaluating a player at 18 years old, you're more so trying to predict where they're going to be from 25 to 28, their core years. In college, you're watching a guy in the portal Where is he going to be next year? And how does that jump up immediately?
It's all about the immediate returns compared to Oklahoma City where it's way down the road. So that's been very, very difficult is trying to, and the word you use, lens, trying to have that lens evolve a little bit, but like that. So I'm jumping on a car on the Autobahn with my hiring process and trying to change my lens with my vision in place all at the same time.
Has not been easy, but the key fundamentals that I want and the staff wants is, it kind of goes back to the thunder process, shooting, intel, good human being, hardworking nature, and processing.
Yeah, I think we'll eventually get there potentially. Andrew Luck is a totally different, that's way outside, but it's a one and only, it's a unicorn right there. Wes and I had known each other for 15 years, probably. So having that relationship where we're in a way tied at the hip has definitely been beneficial. There's already been days that we're cussing each other out.
But I don't really see him as my boss in a sense. I see him as we're on the same team together. And we have the same buy-in. And all we want is to build a winning team here at Cincinnati. And it's year five. The last four years, they've been knocking at the door. And my only goal here is to help those guys get to where they want to go, which is the NCAA tournament and beyond.
Yeah, Ryan, you and I are probably similar where – We grew up with college basketball and we were a fix on one program in particular, right? And we love the following one prospect along the path. That's gone now. And it's never coming back, potentially. Maybe it's a two-year thing with employment, whatever it might be. But... The promising side is you saw what happened at Louisville last year.
You saw what happened at Kentucky. Missouri went 0-19 in SEC play, and they were a top five team in the league last year. So we've lost a few players, and it's also given us leeway to... have the vision in place and not be boxed in with who we have in our roster. So we're pretty excited about who we have coming back.
And it allows us to pinpoint specifically our needs and also have some wiggle room as far as not being boxed in with a player or a prototype or a position.
any given year it's a what if every year in the past it was another down year or we're waiting till we get old and now it's like we can turn this around in an off season so it makes things much more transient in a sense and it it There's more questions at hand, and it's very ambiguous, this whole industry. But it also allows, I'm sure after last year, Missouri fans, what are they saying?
Oh, get rid of Coach Gates and this and that. And now, six, eight months later, they're one of the best teams in America. So as long as the right coaching staff is in place and the right athletic department is there behind those guys with alignment, I think the what if and the hope of being a Florida and Auburn, it's always available.
So you're going to have the non-traditional Blue Bloods have a chance to actually make a run here. You see BYU now in our league. You see Iowa State now in our league. Auburn, Florida, Alabama. And we're hoping to be one of those schools as well.
I think that's our job to remind them and give them a hint. and even the Big O, the tradition is unbelievable as we know. So it's about rekindling that, but it's also about, we're now in the Big 12. We're in a major basketball league. We're not what it was five, six, seven, eight years ago. So this is the third year of Cincinnati being in the Big 12. So it's kind of like,
Let's create our own tradition, our new tradition. Let's look back at what it was yesteryear. And now let's kind of catapult ourselves further based off what we were and now what we can be.
I'll write that down for future use.
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