On March 2, 2022, Willie Cauley-Stein doesn't know it yet, but he's playing his last NBA game. It was with the Sixers, at the end of a 10-day contract. Sixth pick in the 2015 Draft, the former Kings and Warriors center never set foot on an NBA court again, and last season, he was in Italy where he had a blast in the European game, and he even took the rebounding record in the Eurocup!
This summer, he participated in the Basketball Tournament with his former Kentucky alumni, and he lived, perhaps, the best moments of his basketball life. Initially, he wanted to play in the summer league to try his luck again in the NBA, but the call of friends and former teammates was stronger, and he does not regret it.
August 23, 2019, his life changes
“These two weeks were like a movie”Cauley-Stein confides to The Athletic. “It was the best decision ever… I wish I had literally recorded everything, every day, so I could go back and watch it over and over again. It was so special.”
If “WCS” is so enthusiastic, it's because he's coming out of a very complicated period, and that's an understatement. It all started on August 23, 2019. The center had just signed his best season of his career with the Kings, but the franchise refused to extend his contract. He spent a summer working, looking for a contract. That day, he wasn't at home in Sacramento when men burst in and shot his friends sleeping at his house: one dead and two injured! Still without a contract, he agreed to join the Warriors for minimum wage.
“That's how a spiral began in terms of my mental health.”he says. “Trying to deal 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 too many weird things and big changes, and I started taking painkillers to try to escape reality.”
Faced with his adoptive grandmother's illness, he sinks into opioids
Then the grandmother who raised him, Norma Jean Stein, was diagnosed with bone cancer. Cauley-Stein couldn't bear to see her suffer and waste away, and he sank deeper into depression and medication.
“I was taking so many pills that I was sleeping all the time… Or when I was awake, I wasn’t really there. I didn’t handle it the way I was supposed to.” he recognizes. “I didn’t get to say goodbye to my grandmother. I could have been around her more often, FaceTimed her, done so many things to be with her at the end, but I did the exact opposite. I was a coward. Every time I talked to her, she looked different, worse, and I didn’t want to see her like that.”
His grandmother died in December 2021. At the time, he was with the Mavericks, who had just extended him, and the franchise announced that he was absent for “personal reasons”. A week later, Cauley-Stein was interned at his request, and the Mavericks parted ways with him a month later. “I could very well be dead”says Cauley-Stein. “The joy you felt at the Basketball Tournament is different because I know I dodged a bullet. I asked for help before it was too late and I got better, but basketball was a lot harder to get back.”
Addicted to a banned substance
If “WCS” nearly died, it was because he was self-medicating, and when he thought he was buying Percocet, he ended up with pills cut with fentanyl. Banned in France since this summerthis substance is 100 times more powerful than morphine and 50 times more powerful than heroin. The DEA's slogan is simple: ” a pill can kill “, and the U.S. agency estimates that about 70% of the 80 million fake fentanyl pills it seized in 2023 contained a potentially lethal dose.
“I didn’t know that until I asked to be committed. I looked at my wife and said, ‘I hear stories all the time about young people who go to a party, who have never done drugs before, who decide to take a Percocet, and they end up taking fentanyl, and they die. With one pill… I took hundreds of them, for months and years. That could have been me.’”
But Cauley-Stein made the right move at the right time, and today, freed from his demons and troubles, he wants only one thing: to rediscover the pleasure of playing. While waiting to land a contract, he has resumed his studies and hopes to graduate within the year. At 31, he still has his whole life ahead of him.
