TORONTO — Like so many people who achieve success at a frustratingly early age, Dan Tolzman is praised for his work ethic, perseverance and tirelessness above all else. With that said, he gave up on his initial dream pretty easily.

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Tolzman grew up in the desert climate of Tucson, Ariz., but moved to one of the frostiest places in the continental U.S. — attending school at the University of Minnesota-Morris — to play basketball. He was point guard-sized, but that was not his role. He was the team’s designated shooter.

“I was basically a placekicker,” Tolzman says. “I’d come in and break up the zone, and whatever.”

He quit the team during his second season, joining the sports information team. That decision led him to where he is now: At just 33, he is the Toronto Raptors’ director of scouting. Starting this year, he is also the general manager of Raptors 905, the franchise’s new D-League team.

His day-to-day schedule will not change much. He will still travel the world scouting for the Raptors, prioritizing players that the franchise should target on draft night. In addition to their own picks, the Raptors are owed an extra first-round pick in each of the next two drafts. Now, he will scout with the D-League team in mind, knowing that the Raptors can take chances on more projects if they go undrafted.

“He’s one of those guys that would direct traffic in his mind even if he wasn’t doing it,” Raptors president and general manager Masai Ujiri said of giving Tolzman the added responsibility. “He’s not going to tell anybody. But I just know (he’ll take care of it). … He likes it. He studies so many players.”

As long as he has loved basketball, Tolzman has loved the draft, calling it his favourite day of the year. Being able to work on the draft full-time is something of a dream job for him, although he did not have the traditional basketball background to get him into the field. In addition to working on the sports information side in Minnesota, he also minored in journalism, writing a sports column for the school newspaper.

As college wound down in 2004, Tolzman’s girlfriend (now his wife) was weighing graduate school options. Tolzman’s only request was that she choose a city that had professional sports teams, because he was looking for an internship. They settled on Denver, and Tolzman sent out applications en masse.

“I remember a kid out of college who wouldn’t take no for an answer,” said Eric Sebastian, who ran the Nuggets’ public relations staff. He is now the director of basketball operations at the University of Memphis. “He kept hounding me and hounding me. He was very persistent. I couldn’t tell him no.”

Tolzman progressed from making photocopies for free to an internship to full-time status to being the manager of public relations. Knowing that Tolzman had a strong interest in the basketball side, Sebastian even allowed Tolzman to sit in the Nuggets’ draft room, allowing him to participate on the official draft call.

“He just had a strong work ethic,” Sebastian said. “He was extremely bright, driven. He had a basketball background. Even though we were working in PR, he was always throwing trade scenarios at me, or (potential) free agent signings. Working on game notes, he was following a lot of trends and stats. He was throwing ideas at me, and I would run them upstairs to the front office.”

Still, there is an obvious leap required to go from media relations to scouting. Tolzman knew Ujiri from his time as an international scout with the Nuggets. Ujiri went to Toronto in 2007, and then returned to the Nuggets in 2010 to run basketball operations. “They were pretty strapped what they could do, staff-wise,” Tolzman recalled.

Ujiri was not walking into a simple situation, so he needed all the help he could get. Nuggets star Carmelo Anthony wanted out of Denver, and was doing his best to force a trade to New York. Although there were rumours involving the New Jersey Nets, it was widely believed that Anthony would only sign a contract extension with the Knicks. That knowledge severely limited any leverage the Nuggets might have to extract the best return for their best asset, making it a stressful time for a first-time general manager.

“I would come back at night during the whole ’Melo thing, come back to the office,” Ujiri said. “Back then, our offices were cubicles. Where Dan’s office was, you couldn’t know whether he was in his cubicle or not (from the outside). And every time I was talking to all of these people at late hours or early hours, just coming to the office to do all of that stuff, I would just be walking around crazily, and Dan would just be sitting there on his computer watching tape. He would always be there. That stuck with me.

“He’s not trying to be the smartest guy in the room, per se, where people are trying to tell you, ‘I’m smart, I’m smart.’ He just says that he has an idea or ‘Here’s something I know’ or ‘Here is some information.’ And then he goes off and gives the information. There’s no rah-rah. He just goes about his business in an incredible way.”

When Ujiri came back to Toronto to run the Raptors, he called it a no-brainer to hire Tolzman. The same is true of hiring Tolzman to lead Raptors 905.

It is a key venture for the Raptors, because it aligns with Ujiri’s vision that accentuates the importance of youth and length. The Raptors used the 20th pick in 2014 on the completely unknown Bruno Caboclo, and then watched helplessly as he struggled to get on the floor with the Fort Wayne Mad Ants, the D-League affiliate the Raptors shared with 12 other NBA teams.

This year, Caboclo will spend plenty of time in Mississauga, as will Lucas Nogueira, Delon Wright and Norman Powell, all Raptors roster players. That is Tolzman’s main sell to fans: come watch today the guys who might play for the Raptors in a few years. The Raptors are not relying on Raptors 905 to be a money-maker, but they think they will have a product worth watching.

Even that is not the priority for the Raptors, though.

“I think the goal is to create an environment that feels just like the Raptors,” Tolzman said. “We want the same culture. We want the same types of guys. The thing we always talk about is the more low-maintenance the D-League is, the better. If we have players that patrol themselves, they have a goal in mind and are on that path working toward it without any off-the-court stuff, the minutes stuff — if they’re just here playing their tails off and working hard, that’s the type of environment we want to create.

“If we can get one or two players every few years from the D-League on our main roster, we’ve done our job, and it’s created a dividends on investment.”

Tolzman said he is still trying to master some of the D-League’s bizarre rules — attempting to figure out who they could include in their local tryouts and who was off limits was particularly difficult — and also trying to navigate the differences between being a general manager at this level compared to the NBA. He is certain that there is less gamesmanship required, but some of the other aspects, such as attracting non-roster players to the team, will take time.

Those are minor issues, of course. Caboclo, Wright and the rest need their minutes; that is the important thing but it is also the easy part. Tolzman is responsible for the tougher things.

“He knows everything about everything,” Ujiri said. “He’s one of those guys.”