From Philly to Ukraine, Sean Evans steers his pro basketball career amid the war

The ongoing war in Ukraine has prompted more than a little soul-searching from folks who have begun to notice the asymmetrical nature of public interest and the unequal manner in which the United States distributes its empathy and attention to various corners of the globe.

To a certain extent, this self-examination is both warranted and constructive. The first step toward recognizing the humanity in others is recognizing the subconscious biases that exist within ourselves. All of us are captives of our minds, which are themselves held captive by the evolutionary forces that have molded them to model reality with ourselves at its center. While Thomas Friedman’s famous claim that no two countries who both have a McDonald’s had ever been at war with each other may not literally be true, there is plenty of truth in the notion of cultural relatability as deterrent.

I found myself thinking about all of this a couple of weeks ago after a conversation I had with Sean Evans, who at the time was holed up in a hotel room in the Czech Republic in the midst of a whirlwind month that began with his hasty evacuation from an industrial city in central Ukraine and ended with his relocation to Germany, where he is now playing power forward for a team in the country’s top basketball league.

Evans was a standout athlete and student at Northeast High during the early 2000s, earning a number of Division I scholarship offers in football and basketball. He decided to play basketball at St. John’s and started 73 games in four seasons with the Red Storm.

As a senior, he played a key role in an upset of No. 3 Duke that helped lift the school to its first NCAA Tournament bid in a decade. Then, like a lot of collegiate stars whom the NBA passes by, Evans embarked on a basketball odyssey that took him him across the globe multiple times over. It was a journey that would one day leave him in the middle of a war.

“I’ve been through some things,” Evans said, “but nothing of this magnitude.”

The life of an overseas basketball player can be a strange lot. When news broke that former Baylor women’s standout Brittney Griner had been taken into Russian custody for allegedly possessing vaporizer cartridges of hashish, the reaction from many outside observers here in the United States was astonishment at the fact that there were accomplished American athletes playing in such distant and politically volatile regions of the world.

The reality is that Griner’s participation in a league like Russia’s Premier League is standard operating procedure for hundreds of post-collegiate players who are unable to earn a share of the riches of the NBA. While Griner’s standing as one of the top women’s basketball players in the sport helped secure her a multi-million dollar contract several times the size of her WNBA salary, the majority of men who play professionally overseas live a far more transitory existence.

They spend their summers working out at a home base in the United States — for Evans, that means Orlando — and send their agents on a global quest to find the team that is willing to pay them the most money for a year of service. In autumn, often after participating in an NBA training camp, they dust off their passports and secure their visas and leave their families for another winter in a foreign land.

Since graduating from St. John’s in 2011, Evans has played for 14 teams in nine countries, including a stint with the NBA G-League’s Idaho Stampede in 2012-13. Earlier this week, he signed with Ratiopharm Ulm of the German Basketball Bundesliga, which brought him back to the country where his professional career began in 2011-12 with BG Göttingen.

In between, he has spent time in all four hemispheres, bringing his physical style of play to the Far East (Anyang KGC of the Korean Basketball League) and the Near East (Hapoel Eilat and Hapoel Holon of the Israeli Basketball Premier League), to large population centers (Boca Juniors of Buenos Aires, Argentina), and small island states (Ifaistos Limnou B.C of Lemnos, a Greek municipality with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants).

Yet life as an international basketball mercenary can be a surprisingly mundane existence. With teams providing travel and accommodations, and a near-daily schedule of practices and games, professional hoopers like Evans are more like business travelers than they are Carmen San Diego or Indiana Jones. They leave the apartment complexes that they share with other expats, head to the gym for work, and then head home.

“The way they take care of us, we’re kind of in a bubble over there,” Evans said. “We don’t get to see how different it really is.”

Maybe that’s what struck me about Evans’ eventual escape from Ukraine. The banality of it all. In November, when the news of Russia’s mobilization of 100,000 troops along the border first began to circulate, Evans barely paid attention. He’d signed a one-year contract with BC Prometey in the city of Dnipro, a municipality of about 1 million inhabitants on the Dnieper River 250 miles southeast of Kyiv.

The tensions between the two nations long predated Evans’ arrival. Recruited by a former teammate in Greece, Evans finished out the 2020-21 season with Prometey and then returned to Ukraine in August for another season. Even then, there were rumblings of an increased threat at the border. But the Ukrainians on the team shrugged off the potential of a war, and so Evans spent most of his emotional energy alleviating the concerns of the loved ones who frequently called or texted him about the situation.

“What’s crazy is, it was night and day how people were handling it here and how people were handling it at home,” Evans said. “Here every day was just a regular day, like it was nothing. People would say, ‘No chance, not gonna happen.’ It was almost funny.”

It wasn’t until a month before the invasion that the bubble finally burst. With intelligence officials warning that an invasion was imminent, team ownership made the decision to relocate. Prior to a Sunday game, team management gathered the players together and informed them that they were leaving for the Czech Republic, where Prometey would continue its season in the European Champions League, which features the best teams from the highest divisions across the continent.

It’s crazy to me for them to be able to come in every day and compete and get after it, knowing the situation that is going on. The strength that they’ve got is a little bit different.

For Evans, the experience was more anticlimactic than surreal. He packed up his belongings, boarded a plane, and moved on to the next stop. Another hotel room, another gym. The reality of the moment only dawned on him when he began to experience it through the eyes of those directly affected.

As Prometey resumed practice in the Czech Republic, Evans was immersed in a dichotomy unlike any he’d previously experienced. In scrimmages, he was fighting for rebounds with men who would spend the rest of their day on the phone speaking to wives who were living under the threat of an imminent invasion. After scoring a bucket, he’d accept a dap or a pat on the rump from a teammate who still didn’t know how he was going to get his children out of a fast-developing war zone.

“It’s crazy to me for them to be able to come in every day and compete and get after it, knowing the situation that is going on,” Evans said. “The strength that they’ve got is a little bit different.”

In that sense, Evans is like all of us who find ourselves disproportionately captivated by this war versus others. There are a variety of factors that help to explain why we feel the way we do about the situation in Ukraine versus the way we’ve previously felt about wars in Libya, or Syria, or Yemen, or Georgia. These run the gamut of the psychological biases that help to shape every facet of our day-to-day experience. Some of it is ignorance. Some of it is ethnocentrism. Some of it is the messaging that we consume. But all of it boils down to one of the fundamental characteristics of human nature: Everything feels a lot more personal when you are able to see it through someone else’s eyes.

For Evans, that perspective is as visceral as it gets. It is something that will inform the rest of his playing days, and the future that he envisions as an NBA coach.

A few days after we talked, BC Prometey played what proved to be its last game of the season, and perhaps much longer. The team withdrew from the Champions League, and annulled its players’ contracts, and set them free to find a new basketball home.

For Evans, that meant returning to the country where his professional career started. For many of his teammates, though, it meant a one-way ticket to an unimaginable unknown.