Former Kentucky Men's Basketball Star Reveals He Went To Rehab

6 NFL Players Who Also Played Division 1 Basketball (1:02)

Nine years ago, Willie Cauley-Stein was coming off a Final Four appearance at Kentucky and was an NBA lottery pick.

The 7-footer’s last appearance in the league came in March 2022, a one-game cameo with the Philadelphia 76ers that came a few months after he left the Dallas Mavericks for undisclosed personal reasons.

At the time, few knew what Cauley-Stein has now disclosed in an eye-opening feature with The Athletic’s Kyle Tucker: he was in rehab.

Cauley-Stein, 31, was addicted to prescription painkillers which he thought were fake Percocet. In fact, he was taking bootleg pills laced with fentanyl, which is why he told Tucker he “could easily be dead.”

“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.”

LOUISVILLE, KY – MARCH 19: Willie Cauley-Stein #15 of the Kentucky Wildcats looks on against the Hampton Pirates during the second round of the 2015 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament at the KFC YUM! Center on March 19, 2015 in Louisville, Kentucky. (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images)

Cauley-Stein said his drug use spiraled starting in 2019. In August of that year, three of his friends were shot and killed in a home he was leasing in Sacramento while playing for the Kings.

Later, Cauley-Stein’s grandmother, who had raised him as a child, was diagnosed with bone cancer, which furthered his slide. She died Dec. 1, 2021, six days before the big man checked himself into rehab.

“I could see where I was heading,” Cauley-Stein said. “It was like I had a thousand pounds on my back. I didn’t like who I saw in the mirror, and I was going to have to keep on doing drugs to play. I told my agent, ‘I gotta get help.’ As soon as I called and put myself into the NBA drug program and told them everything, it was instant relief. I got swept with this feeling — I’ve done a lot of s—, but I’ve never had a feeling so good — like my grandmother was scooping me up and giving me the biggest hug.”

Now sober, a rejuvenated Cauley-Stein was a standout performer on Kentucky’s La Familia team of alumni in this summer’s TBT.

After playing briefly in Italy and Puerto Rico last season, he is keeping all options open for continuing his professional career, but more importantly, his overall health and well-being seem to be in a good place.