Willie Cauley-Stein reminded us this summer why he is one of Kentucky’s most popular basketball players. The former All-American took us all on a nostalgic rollercoaster ride through the TBT. As he blocked seven shots at Rupp Arena and then hit three-pointer after three-pointer in front of a packed crowd at Freedom Hall, many people were probably wondering, “Why didn’t this guy make it in the NBA?”
After years away from the NBA spotlight, Cauley-Stein is now announcing his retirement. He shared his story with Kyle Tucker, and the details are not for the faint of heart.
“I might as well be dead,” is something you often hear from people in recovery. For Cauley-Stein, that’s no exaggeration.
In November 2021, he left the Dallas Mavericks to begin a 65-day inpatient rehab program. When he checked into the facility, he told officials that Percocet was his drug of choice. The prescription painkillers numbed his physical pain and mental anguish. He did not take counterfeit Percocet pills. The counterfeit pills were laced with fentanyl, the deadly drug regularly responsible for accidental overdoses.
“I didn’t know until I turned myself in. I looked at my wife and said, ‘Oh my God,’ because I hear stories all the time about kids who go to a party, have never done drugs before, decide to take a Percocet, and it turns out it’s fentanyl, and they die. From a pill,” Cauley-Stein said. “Dude, I’ve taken hundreds of them, over months and years. It could have so easily been me.”
(The Athletic: Willie Cauley-Stein turns back time in basketball tournament with Kentucky’s La Familia)
From tragedy to triumph in the TBT
Cauley-Stein didn’t start using drugs overnight. After his 2015 All-American season at Kentucky, he was selected sixth overall by the Sacramento Kings. Towards the end of his contract, he was playing the best basketball of his career. He was voted the NBA’s Most Improved Player after averaging 11.9 points and 8.4 rebounds per game. Instead of getting a new contract, he was forced into free agency and ended up with Golden State. And that’s when things started to go wrong.
Three of his friends were shot, one of them killed, in the house he rented in Sacramento, around the same time his grandmother was diagnosed with bone cancer.
“It started a kind of mental downward spiral,” he said. “I was trying to cope with that and play basketball at the same time – for a new team, with a bad contract, and then my wife got pregnant – there were just too many strange things and big changes, and I was taking painkillers to just escape reality.”
Fortunately, he has decided not to run away anymore. The rehab stay has changed his personal life. Now he hopes that his impressive performance at the TBT can breathe new life into his ambitions as a professional basketball player.
The agile, 7-foot-4 player averaged 10.2 points and 6.6 rebounds per game while shooting over 70 percent of his shots. He was named Defensive Player of the Year at the TBT for blocking 14 shots, five more than the next best player. Although they fell short in the semifinals of the $1 million winner-takes-all tournament, Cauley-Stein plans to return to the event next year.
“This game we played here is the reason I decided to play here,” he said shortly after the victory at Freedom Hall. “This is different. I knew it was going to be a sellout. I thought to myself, please don’t lose because I’m trying to play this game. Thank God we didn’t. We got to play this game and there’s no other feeling like this. It took ten years to get that feeling back and I’m going to take advantage of it.”
All career options are on the table, but he isn’t ruling out returning to Lexington with his family to finish his degree. Cauley-Stein was going through a dark patch not too long ago. After spending a summer with his old family in Kentucky, he feels like the easy-going person Big Blue Nation fell in love with again.
“All these people who remember me after all this time and still love me, it’s like, wow, this really is my home.”
