Willie Cauley-Stein details addiction problems: I could easily be dead

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