Nick Nurse was on the I-235, cutting across the top of downtown Des Moines, Iowa, when he properly noticed “The Well” for the first time. It was 2006, and he was 39 and back in his home state after wrapping up his 11th season as a head coach in the British Basketball League. “I was trying to get back to the U.S.,” he says now, sitting behind the desk in his office at the Toronto Raptors practice facility. “It felt like it was time to do it. And I was trying to get jobs in the D-League.”

Since he’d landed in Iowa, Nurse had reached out to several team owners and even the league office to put himself forward for any position that could help him get a toehold in the NBA. He’d been shut out across the board. “I couldn’t get an assistant job in the D-League,” he says. “But I knew it was my entry point. I knew it was, right?”

Nurse pulled off the interstate at the next exit and looped around to where he’d seen the building. Wells Fargo Arena, a 16,000-seat facility he would eventually come to know intimately, had been completed the previous July. Nurse pulled into the parking lot and started making calls from his car. He got through to the arena’s general manager, who told him the building’s only permanent resident was a minor-league hockey team and, well, they’d love to host some basketball. Nurse took that bit of momentum and threw it into his next few calls.

He started with the NBA head office, where he was told to try the D-League office, where he was eventually put through to the league’s president, Phil Evans, who heard his pitch and agreed that Des Moines was the perfect place for an expansion franchise. Evans was on board, but Nurse still didn’t have a team lined up. “OK, they want to do it and they want to do it,” he thought to himself when the last call wrapped. “Now what am I supposed to do?”

It was a friend and fellow coach named Orv Salmon who suggested Nurse reach out to Jerry Crawford. An Iowa lawyer and Democratic Party lobbyist, Crawford ducked Nurse initially, trying to pawn him off on other members of his firm. “I said, ‘It’s gotta be Jerry and I can’t tell anyone else what it is,’” Nurse remembers. “[Crawford] finally got on the phone and his direct quote was, ‘Not another f—ing minor-league basketball team.’ But he said, ‘Come on down.’” A year later, the Crawford-owned Iowa Energy took the floor at The Well for their inaugural season with Nurse at the head of the bench.