Willie Cauley-Stein says the Kings told him he would get an $80,000,000 contract if he averaged a double-double, but then kept him out of fourth quarters so he couldn’t reach it - via Run Your Race Podcast
Does he know this is something people could easily fact check him on? He averaged 7.2 minutes in the 4th quarter that season with a total of 1019 possessions which put him at 4th highest on the team and was the most of any of their bigs with only Bagley anywhere close.
Don’t let facts get in the way of letting bro cook
Lmao this guy is such a grade A dumbass 🤣
I mean, he tattooed his fucking face.
He’s a clown, but OP is cherry picking stats the best he can. I mean, come on, he’s using Bagley as a reference despite him being a rookie and starting 4 games the entire year. So the only “big” that played more minutes than him came off the bench. That’s not evidence against what is being said in the video.
I mean, let’s say WCS is telling the truth and the Kings did commit 80 million to him if he averaged a double double (especially since OP doesn’t seem to disagree with that). He averaged essentially two quarters of basketball per game. You don’t think he could have averaged another rebound and a half if he played more than two quarters a game.
I swear, it’s like people in this sub just look to shit on people no matter what.
I swear it’s like people on this sub don’t have any reading comprehension. What stats are being cherry picked? He played the 4th most possessions on the team in the 4th quarter and the most amongst the bigs on the roster. He also averaged over half of the 4th quarter. That clearly shows the Kings weren’t holding him out of 4th quarters. He got plenty of playing time and opportunities. You typed all that out without even a basic understanding of what I said. LOL.
No, you proceeded to “type out” LOL a bunch of additional cherry picked stats. What solid starter in this league averages 7 minutes in the fourth? The dude averaged about a half of basketball per game. You completely ignored (in honor of your cherry picked nature) the main point of my post about him averaging a half of basketball per game.
Ignore everything else that’s transpired in this post and answer this question. Do you think he could have averaged another rebound and a half per game had they played him as much as they played their bench? Again, I think the dude is trash and exited the league when it was time. But the point you’re arguing is silly and it’s like you constructed a useless hill to die on while you claim I have no reading comprehension.
You clearly lack a basic understanding of what the whole argument is. No shit if he played more his numbers would go up. Am I or anyone else arguing that? No. We are arguing his statement on the Kings “held me out of 4th quarters”. They clearly didn’t. You are the one dying on a useless hill here. Lol……
As a neutral party in this convo, I’d put the keyboard down on this one, big dog.
I don’t think he’s saying bagley played more than him in the forth
I didn’t say “more.” Did you even read the OP? WCS played, on average, a half of basketball per game.
You literally did say “more”
You went on this long as ramble and you didn’t even understand what he said.
Boo downvote this guy, I prefer to get on my knees and swallow reddit slops with no questions ask.
Didn’t Lou Williams tell a story this year, something like getting called up when AI was traded, barely getting to the arena but eventually hitting a game winning shot, and the dates and game logs don’t back that up at all? These guys are crazy lol.
Although it reminds me of when I started watching the affair, I thought it was a great idea and well done where each episode would show the same scenes twice but from both main characters point of views and how they each saw it was drastically different. Flawed/reformed memories can be wild.
Honestly Lou Will has played 1000+ games, he can mix up different games if he’d like. That’s a lot to remember.
But 1 game is different from a whole season lol
Lou Will has also played a bunch of games hungover or still drunk he’s allowed to forget a couple
Guys just get stuff wrong. I listen to wrestlers do long form interviews sometimes and they almost constantly mix up facts/matches with each other even though it’s literally their own past. Just how memory is.
To answer your question …. I don’t think so lmao
He was getting pulled in the 4th bc they couldn’t trust him.
And he still played plenty in the 4th, he just sucked and never seemed like he cared. Willie was more interested in off the court stuff than basketball.
Didn’t he even admit he had a massive drug addiction?
Yeah he had an opiate problem. His season in Philly it really showed.
Even that doesn’t hold up, if OP’s numbers are right. 7.2 MPG in the 4th quarter comes out to 28.8 MPG overall. That’s above his 27.3 MPG for the season, meaning he was averaging MORE minutes in the 4th than his per-game average would expect.
This really highlights the perverseness of these incentives. An individual needing to score more points in the last quarter to get a payday might make decisions based on that rather than what the team needs
Well you’ve got a lot of nerve…
He was the first (or one of the first) Jokic stoppers believe it or not lmao
Bro he said there were games when that happened he didn’t say he never played in the 4th quarter just that it happened multiple times that he had a good game like 17point 5-6-7 rebounds and then they don’t play him in the 4th. Tf are you talkin about averages lmao try to listen to what you’re hearing and understand it bruh it really isn’t that hard
I went through all 81 games he played that season. 11⁄10 vs Lakers. 3⁄24 vs Lakers. 4⁄7 vs Pelicans. Those were the only instances where he played no minutes in the 4th where there wasn’t an obvious reason for it such as them being blown out, them blowing a team out, or him being in foul trouble. And for reference in those blowouts, none of the starters got minutes. 3 times in 81 games. Him trying to make it seem like the Kings were deliberately tanking his minutes so he wouldn’t average a double double is just ridiculous. He played normal rotation minutes all season long outside of those 3 games and maybe he was just having a bad game for those 3. Maybe he tweaked something. Even if he didn’t 3 games out of 81 isn’t the difference between him averaging a double double on the season vs not.
edit: All of this is also flat out irrelevant. It isn’t like there was a clause that gets triggered and if he averaged a double double on the season he would automatically get that contract. The Kings could simply just not give it to him. So what reason did the Kings even have to do what he is accusing them of doing? On the contrary, it actually is more beneficial for the Kings to not do that in order to increase his value to the 29 other teams. The simple answer to all this is he just wasn’t a good player. That is why he didn’t get $80m.
Tldr, just looking at the notification and how you actually started that comment (which you somehow left out of the edit part) was enough to not take the time and read the book you just wrote to me, ty🥱😂 boy you really got offended asl im crying
If you’re older than 22, this is an embarrassing comment. It’s barely literate English. You should probably read more books not less
If you had seen the original comment you would understand but let’s just go with the reddit hivemind
I was so high on him when we drafted him. Genuinely one of the dumbest players I’ve ever seen on the court, but I did admit to being high a lot in game so that’s probably why. Wish it would have worked out, hope he’s doing ok
he was so high too
apparently he had a crazy workout with the heat and were desperately trying to get him lol
If you watch him in this video you can see he’s not so bright
Probably still on them pills…
He had all the physical tools to be a perennial DPOY candidate and a high level rim runner. Too bad he never put it together.
He was a high level rim runner alright
the guy with the “Puso” face tattoo is a dumbass? Well I never…
Man I confidently predicted he would be the best big man to come out of that very Center loaded draft class.
He’s a guy with all the physical gifts but never had the brains for it nor the work ethic, his mental issues surely didn’t help. I was high on him in Dallas too, he had moments where it looked like he could really become a decent center.
Feels like cope, this would be where an agent goes around talking teams up about per/36, rebound% and other advanced stats to get teams hyped about signing him.
Assuming those other numbers are good of course…
Yeah, not even tryna dunk on the guy since he’s being through the wringer personally, but his numbers (box score & advanced) did not warrant an $80M deal. Doubt he’d even get 1/3rd of that tbh
Nerlens Noel was offered that type of deal iirc
There was a LOT of money going around at the time that wasn’t earned.
Nah man you can’t tell me Mozgov and the corpse of Joakim Noah didn’t deserve that money
The fact that he thinks NBA GMs just look at box scores to decide how much to pay guys is hilarious.
Definitely cope. Dude had the talent to be an elite defensive and rim running big. He just had a drug problem.
Even if we assume the Kings did tell him that, that’s a goal they want him to work towards. They’re not going to sabotage their own rotations by playing him 36+ min just so he can statpad and earn a bigger contract. That’s what players don’t get.
You aren’t guaranteed minutes. Yes you need playing time to get stats and earn a big contract, but you aren’t entitled to that playing time. You gotta earn that playing time by not being ass before you can think about earning your next contract, and for anyone who wasn’t around back then, he was indeed ass.
alot of players love this “oh they didnt play me cuz they didnt wanna pay me” or “they had to play the guy who was worse than me cuz of business reasons”
Lack of self awareness and accountability…
Playing the victim and yet he made 25 million over 7 years. With taxes he probably brought in around half of that, but still… I have zero sympathy for these bum ass players who have enough money to last a lifetime and still complain that they didn’t make more.
wtf does his face say?
Lol Kangz
It says Live Laugh Love
Eat pray love
No regrats.
It says “Pus ❤️”, and then “Play hard ball” I think
Good
Biggest bum I’ve seen this league
He had a drug addiction. Had some friends who got killed and started taking fentanyl laced pain pills. Ruined his career
Hope he’s clean and okay then.
Why are so much shit laced with Fent these days. Like ffs.
cheap, easy to make, easy to smuggle because you need so little of it
Easy to dose down to much lower levels. It’s really meant to be taken slowly through the skin in a patch or in a very dilute form. You concentrate that and split it up and you can get the same relative dose of a months supply of something else
Oh shit.. this confirmd? Did he get one of those quiet bans?
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5727058/2024/08/29/willie-cauley-stein-the-basketball-tournament/
“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.” 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. 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.”
“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.”
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.
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.”
Not sure I believe all that lol dude was prolly just doing drugs.
Seems like you don’t watch much basketball.
Once you get face tattooed it’s all downhill for ya. Goof ball ass dudes
Willie Trillie Cauley-Stein Ayo-Ayo
You know what? Nvm… you got it WCS.
One of the lowest IQ players ive seen at that height
Jaxon Hayes before Jaxon Hayes
If he was any good they would have kept him in the game and paid him.
He never seemed like a serious player. I remember when he was on the Mavs he would post fit check pics from the bench on IG.
I’m afraid the blazers are gonna pull some bullshit like this on timelord with how his money is only guaranteed if he plays over 50 games.
I think that’s fair with him tbh, dudes never really healthy. The contract should say “available to play 50 games” though imo. That if hes healthy and coach doesnt sub him in to rip him off like youre saying, hes protected
He’s too good and their C depth is too shallow to do something like this. Plus they’d just sour a relationship with him doing that. They wanted him back pretty badly (obviously given the contract)
he was pretty dogshit tbh
Yeah… I don’t believe this for a second. Dude was not good.
Uhhhhh no bro that was the drugs talking
will the 80 million make him a better man?
Lmao this dude would come into my restaurant, order something off the menu, ask us to change every single thing about it except the protein until it was a completely different dish, which we obliged, and then would tip \(40 on a \)800 tab
Yeah….because the Kings would have been beholden to that. “Ah shit! We shouldn’t have made the ol’ ‘80 mil for a double-double’ deal a binding contract!”
This isn’t on topic, but I always thought his little red face tattoos looked like kawaii anime blush.
Willie Kawaii-Stein.
He’s wrong but it’s copium. Which I can relate to lol
Bro was the definition of “all the tools, none of the toolbox.” Kings were shady for that but let’s be real, even with 4th quarter minutes this man wasn’t averaging a double-double consistently.
To be fair…Dude is 7 feet and couldn’t get 10 rebounds in 3 quarters lol. Sometimes you just gotta take accountability and say you were ass….His max rebounds were 8 in 27 minutes.
I know players like to blame the organization and coaches which is fair. But on the flip side…what if they were trying to motivate buddy to play harder or crash the damn glass?
For contrast…Mitchell Robinson averaged 9 rebounds in 19 minutes lol…I can’t really have sympathy for this guy…
Free Willy
The 80 Mils contract !! What’s the inflation.
couldnt they have just had the production and not paid him the money when it was time? i mean verbal contracts arent enforceable in the nba. If was any other team i would say he was lying 100 percent its the kings so its only 99
Dude could move his feet I loved him for a hot second
Crazy how playing with Luka, he was averaging like 50% from the field on lobs lmao brother was terrible at rim rolling
Dude got a face tattoo…
I dunno. His face is hard to read.
why would they hold him out instead of just playing him and not giving him the contract
Willie is one of those guys where their passion isn’t basketball but he was good enough to get paid to do it.
Lol locked in. That bum
Dude only earned \(25m for his entire career. There's no fucking way they told him they were going to give him a \)80m contract
Sounds like the Kings. Fill your roster salary with shit that doesn’t contribute to winning instead of building a ‘team’
Calling bullshit lol
who the foook is dat guy??
This guy is full of shit.
This is why Antonio Brown did what he did but wrongly in the middle of the freaking game , the word is then coach Bruce Arians wouldn’t get him the ball and he felt Brady was betraying in that aspect by not throwing him the ball. The last ball he caught I believe, it was a sick route and great catch. AB has lost his mind tho
I thought he was gonna be tyson chandler.
kings found a loophole in their own contract incentive and used it against their own player lmao. what a franchise
I know its easy to shit on the Kings but that’s not what happened at all.
He got more minutes than he deserved tbh
Yet another player the kings have ruined. The franchise needs to be shut down.
This is one you can’t blame on the Kings.