- Name:Kyan Evans
- Position:Combo Guard
- Year: Sophomore
- HT/WT:6-2/175
- Hometown: Kansas City
- Previous School:Colorado State
Background
Few mid-major coaches possess as shrewd an eye for undervalued talent as Niko Medved. The Colorado State coach and his staff astutely scooped up Isaiah Stevens, David Roddy, and John Tonje during his seven seasons in Fort Collins. And before he accepted the job this spring at Minnesota, his alma mater, it looked like another developmental success was in the making with Kyan Evans.
Let’s be clear: power-conference programs were not racing to Staley High in the Northland. Listed at 6-foot-1 and 170 pounds, Evans was rated as the state’s No. 13 prospect in the 2023 cycle. On the grassroots circuit, he averaged just 3.5 points per game and was buried toward the bottom of a Mokan Elite roster that won the Nike Peach Jam.
Yet few prospects compiled the kind of CV that Evans crafted while playing at Staley.
As a senior, he averaged 13.2 points, 4.0 rebounds, and 5.2 assists to guide the Eagles to a 30-2 record and a Class 6 state title. He was named the state’s Gatorade Player of the Year and picked up the DiRenna Award as the top boy’s player in the KC metro area.
When Evans arrived at CSU, Stevens, arguably the best player in program history, still had a season of eligibility. Unsurprisingly, Medved didn’t strain to create seat time for Evans, who averaged 8.1 minutes per game. And to an extent, Evans had veteran insurance alongside him in Nique Clifford, a potential NBA draft pick, and Jalen Lake as he acclimated to running the show.
Unsurprisingly, the first month of that transition proved stilted as Evans tried to up his processing speed. CSU’s offense is a blend of concepts – Princeton, Shuffle, Five-Out – heavily predicated on reads. Trying to discern when to attack, facilitate or shoot creates some lag time, resulting in a shooting slump for Evans.
By December, though, Evans started settling in, beginning with a 4 of 5 shooting performance against Loyola Marymount. Two weeks later, he canned a 3-ball to close a critical road win against Nevada. On Jan. 14, Evans popped off 14 second-half points in a road loss to San Diego State. He used another second-half flurry to notch a career-high 20 points in a gritty road win over Air Force in late February.
Evans’ career stat line might not pique your interest initially, but he averaged 13.4 points and 2.9 assists over the Rams’ final 15 games. He also shot 50.6 percent beyond the arc on decent volume (5.1 attempts) as CSU surged to win the Mountain West Conference Tournament and notch an upset of No. 5-seed Memphis in the NCAA Tournament.
When Medved accepted the job in the Twin Cities, his former employer swiftly promoted Ali Faorkhmanesh to fill the job. Yet it didn’t stop Evans, who was mentored by Farokhmansh on the finer points of running CSU’s offense, from hoping in the portal. However, it wasn’t followed by quick word that he would follow Medved to the Big Ten.
Instead, there’s potential mutual interest between Evans and Missouri, which raises an interesting question: Is the timing right for a homecoming?
What is Evans’ positional role on the offensive end?
The brain trust’s affinity for Medved is nothing new, and apparently, MU’s staff seems to harbor a similar respect.
Pursuing Evans marks the second time in three years that the Tigers have tried to pluck a player steeped in Medved’s tutelage. While it is not top of mind, it’s hard to ignore the significant overlap in each program’s tactics on the offensive end. Both installed modernized versions of Princeton concepts, but they can also flow from early-clock attacks into five-out alignments. Medved’s offense taps into the shuffle offense, and MU assistant coach Rob Summers is deeply versed in the system, having played under coach John Beilein at West Virginia.
Those shared traits make evaluating and projecting how Evans might fit into the Tigers’ rotation easy. Yet the precise role he might play is a tad fungible because Evans doesn’t cut the profile of a cool on-ball maestro at this stage of his career.
Instead, Evans’ best touches came after he triggered a set and shifted off the ball for the Rams. His play-type data reveals he fared best as a spot-up threat, including a 43.8 percent clip off the catch from beyond the 3-point arc.
Still, there’s quite a bit of dark blue on that chart, indicating suboptimal efficiency. Meanwhile, Evans only averaged 0.663 points per possession as a PNR scorer. Folding in his work as a passer doesn’t juice that efficiency (0.745 PPP) much, either. In fact, his overall performance in ball screens landed in the 21st percentile among Division-I players.
Off the bat, we’re not evaluating a burgeoning facilitator. Instead, Evans, listed at 6-2 and 175 pounds, functions more as a smaller floor spacer in CSU’s attack. Working through his film underscores that initial impression, too.
The shared schematic preferences are handy in that sorting effort, too.
It’s easiest to start with the delay series, which entails feeding a big man at the elbow and having the passer screen away to screen for another guard. The big man reads off-ball action in this setup, which varies based on the coach installing the system. For example, MU uses high and low split cuts with a dozen options on the menu.
What matters for our purposes, though, is Evans frequently throws that entry pass and becomes a spacer. Often, he’s occupying the weak-side slot, filling behind at the top of the key, or cutting off a teammate acting as the reader. If that looks familiar, it’s because Nick Honor spent two years doing (mostly) the same thing.
Similarly, CSU also utilizes various sets from the point series, which embodies Carril’s fable system. The first couple of clips you’ll see below utilize chin screens – or over – to trigger the action before a guard passes to the big at the top of the key. From there, the options diversify.
In the first two snippets, the big sets an away screen that tees up a high pick-and-roll. Both times, Evans winds up filling behind a driver for a kickout. After that, a passer literally skips a step and a pass across the court to Evans, who has lifted to the slot and exploited an early overload. And sometimes, the set might progress to where the big receives a rip screen, cuts to a post up, and pings the ball back out to Evans.
Yet Medved wasn’t above stripping offense down to the studs and playing in straightforward five-out sets.
Evans isn’t locked into that positional designation from here to eternity. We don’t know what Medved’s ultimate vision was for Evans or the particulars of the development plan to get him there. Perhaps this summer called for heavy individual drills or small-side games to drill him on PNR reads. Maybe Medved would have slightly reconfigured his offense – like he did for Stevens – to accentuate Evans’ strengths.
All we see is the current body of work. It suggests Evans is far from being a bona fide secondary creator. Undoubtedly, a 20.3 assist rate is nothing to dismiss out of hand. The question is whether Evans can clean up his decision-making in an offseason because turning the ball over 25.6 percent of the time in pick-and-rolls isn’t tolerable.
Moreover, Evans’ rim finishing in ball screens is also spotty. He only attacked the rim 18 times this season out of a high PNR, drives that were only worth 0.889 points. And Evans barely tried to get two feet in the paint via side ball screens.
Forays into the lane rarely ended with Evans, a pacey handler, reaching the restricted area. Credit to him for knowing how to use simple dribble counters and play off two feet, but the result was still a healthy supply of runners, floaters and scooping finishes against size. And because of his light frame, any contact could nudge Evans off course.
To his credit, Evans shooting off the bounce (1.10 PPP) shows promise, but most of those attempts were pull-ups behind the arc taken off one or two dribbles. Still, we critiqued Tamar Bates for settling at times in the mid-range rather than slashing into a gap, and almost 37 percent of his shots came at the rim – or twice as often as Evans.
How clean is Evans’ fit into an aggressive defense?
During the summer, Evans’ reported ritual wasn’t monastic, but it was focused: Individual skill work, followed by sessions with CSU’s strength coach and wrapped with marathon clip sessions using access to Farokmanesh’s film account.
Usually, that familiar narrative builds towards explaining how a young player started scaling the skill curve offensively. However, reports from Fort Collins suggest the impact might have been more profound for Evans on the defensive end.
As a smaller guard, he’s also a natural target. Yet a look at his defensive profile supplies some optimism. Per Synergy, Evans allowed 0.836 PPP, ranking in the 64th percentile nationally for efficiency. He spent most of his time navigating ball screens (39.7%) or recovering to spot-ups (37.4%), grading out no worse than average.
Conducting a thorough sift play type reveals that spot-up 3s had a slight skewing effect on his overall profile, but that’s offset by respectable work (0.763 PPP) when hunted in high PNRs. It’s also where I concentrated my film review.
Why? First, Evans didn’t allow a ton of open 3s, even if shooters converted the ones he did concede at a high clip. Put simply, I’m not docking him for shooting variance. Second, his ability to hold up in a physical league like the SEC is paramount, and that transition would entail playing in a far more aggressive scheme than the one used in Fort Collins.
Under Medved, the Rams never finished higher than 98th in turnover rate or higher than 135th in block rate. His program’s steal rates – a good indicator of creating live-ball turnovers – were highly variable. It indicates an adaptive approach to applying pressure based on the skill mix among the personnel on his roster.
That’s drastically different from Dennis Gates’ philosophy, where turnover generation is critical to flipping possession math. That manifests in far more aggressive PNR coverages, playing up the line to deny reversals and giving guards some latitude to gamble.
But when we call up Evans’ film, we see a guard executing a far more restrained approach.
For starters, CSU is not a switch-heavy team. Its frontcourt rotation fluctuated throughout the year, and none of Jaylen Crocker-Johnson, Kyle Jorgensen, Rashaan Mbemba, or Nikola Djapa have the sort of length and fluidity to slide up and down the positional ladder. So, there were plenty of PNR possessions where Evans needed strength to fight over the top and stick with his assignment.
But if an opponent brought two Rams to the ball, the scheme relied on varying degrees of containment. Sometimes, that meant using a push coverage to prevent craftier drivers from rejecting a ball screen or using a snake dribble to keep Evans in trail position.
Against handlers with less verve or more prone to pull up, drop coverage proved suited to the task. It also insulated Evans from getting too aggressive at the point of attack. Often, turnovers forced in a PNR came from a bad pass or by an off-ball defender coming in to rake the ball loose.
And when the Rams did switch, it was either early in a possession that started in a zone alignment and shifted to man or insurance in late-clock situations.
That’s a lot of clips to digest. However, throughout that progression, you don’t see Evans taking the approach we see with Anthony Robinson. He doesn’t crowd or get under his man. He doesn’t sell out to turn a dribbler in a bid to rip and run.
Data also tells us Evans isn’t a chaos agent.
Last season, Evans posted a 1.9 STOCK%, which blends steal and block rates. None of Robinson, Tamar Bates, Tony Perkins or T.O. Barrett posted a STOCK% lower than 3.5 percent for MU. When Evans tried to stir up some disruption, his personal foul efficiency – steals and blocks divided by fouls – was checked in at 0.36. That’s far worse than what Sean East II (0.50) and Nick Honor (0.48) put together two seasons ago when MU hacked the crap out of opponents.
Is Evans a mostly sound defender? Yes. Do his abilities translate to the stylistic preferences in Columbia? That’s debatable. It’s also worth remembering that opponents made targeting East and Honor in switches a central feature of game plans. It happened down the stretch again this year, and MU was vulnerable despite having the sturdier presence of Perkins on the floor.
Compromising positional size might make sense if we had proof that adding Evans would be additive to Robinson and boost takeaways. Yet the available data and film suggest that’s unlikely – at least in the short term.
Summary
Undoubtedly, Evans ticks some boxes for MU: shooting, assisting as a ball mover, and steadiness in the shell defensively.
It’s also easy to see he’d benefit from more reps as an on-ball creator, adding some more functional strength to play directly to the rim and gauging whether he can fit into a turnover-craving defense. Finding those answers, however, might require accepting he needs an offseason of development and season to acclimate to the nightly grind in the SEC.
Coming off Gates’ first season, taking on an intriguing project like Evans would have been an easy sell. The Tigers urgently need a proven scorer in the backcourt, particularly for a player capable of creating their offense in PNRs, handoffs, and isolations. You could argue it was the one missing – and vital – component for the Tigers during the run-in this season.
Nobody would deny Evans’ progress or tantalizing potential. But is he a guy who can plug in next year and routinely deliver an efficient 14 or 15 points per game for a top-25 squad? I’m skeptical.
To be clear, this isn’t meant to slag Evans. Instead, it’s simply a matter of the timelines for a player and program not quitealigning. Now, the addition of Evans might make more sense if he was part of a tandem that featured a guard with a high-major track record and more positional size.
Should the Tigers make Evans their featured acquisition this offseason, it’s reasonable to assume the program’s ceiling next season will float based on how well a slew of young players progress this offseason.