For most, The Basketball Tournament is an annual summer sideshow, a bunch of college alumni teams competing for a $1 million prize while creating television inventory in the dog days of the sports calendar. But for Cauley-Stein, who went from All-American at Kentucky to No. 6 pick in the 2015 NBA Draft to All-Rookie team to full-time starter to suddenly and mysteriously out of the league in what should’ve been his prime, an invitation to represent his alma mater again was life-affirming. When former teammates James Young, the Harrison twins and Tyler Ulis joined him on a team whose name was a nod to their old coach, John Calipari, La Familia took off on a nostalgia-fueled run like the DeLorean in “Back to the Future.” It transported Cauley-Stein back to a place where he felt loved and a time when he had hope before he lost the game — and himself — at the bottom of a pill bottle. “I could easily be dead,” Cauley-Stein said. “So that joy you saw from me in the TBT is different because I know the bullet I really dodged. I asked for help before it was too late, and I got better, but the basketball thing has been a lot harder to get back. So when they asked me to do this, it was too perfect. It just replicated those old times, just exactly how it was. Boom, I got showered with all this love that I needed, absolutely needed and played the best basketball I’ve played in years. That s— was dope.”
Source: New York Times
Source: New York Times
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He played in 422 NBA games and started 255 of them, but Cauley-Stein’s last appearance in that league was March 2, 2022. It was an unceremonious ending, one measly minute of action to conclude a 10-day contract with the Philadelphia 76ers. A last gasp after he stepped away from the Dallas Mavericks in late November 2021 — the team cited “personal reasons” — and then it waived him in January. What almost nobody knew at the time, and what he never previously has discussed publicly, is that Cauley-Stein was in the middle of a 65-day stay at an inpatient rehabilitation center for substance abuse. He thought the substance he had been abusing was bootleg Percocet, a combination of oxycodone and acetaminophen, which is bad enough. He had been eating those by the handful to numb his pain, he told the rehab center upon check-in, so it could expect to see that on his drug test. But it didn’t. -via New York Times / August 29, 2024
It turns out, he had been buying fake pills, laced with fentanyl. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s website describes fentanyl as 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin. “One pill can kill” is the DEA’s slogan, and the agency estimates about 70 percent of the 80 million fentanyl-laced fake pills it seized in 2023 contained a potentially lethal dose. “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 going to a party, never taking a drug before, deciding to pop a Percocet, and it ends up being fentanyl, and they die. From one pill,” Cauley-Stein said. “Dude, I was taking hundreds of them, for months and years. It could’ve so easily been me.” -via New York Times / August 29, 2024
One of the friends Cauley-Stein made in rehab was only out for five days, he said, after a 75-day stay, before he overdosed and died. “You could kind of tell the way he was walking around that he wasn’t ready to leave yet, that he still wanted to do it,” Cauley-Stein said. “Not me. There’s nothing you could ever tell me to get me to do that again. I want no part of it.” -via New York Times / August 29, 2024
