Willie Cauley-Stein Rumors
All NBA Players
Position: C
Born: 08/18/93
Height: 7-0 / 2.13
Weight:242 lbs. / 109.8 kg.
Salary: $4,100,000
Born: 08/18/93
Height: 7-0 / 2.13
Weight:242 lbs. / 109.8 kg.
Salary: $4,100,000
Willie Cauley-Stein was in fifth grade when he packed up his bag for a trek across Spearville, Kansas, a tiny blip of a town — population: 800 — just up US-50 from Dodge City, which passes for a metropolis in a blur of flatlands and windmills. Cauley-Stein was headed to a class, in which he was enrolled by his grandmother, at a family friend’s house. The snacks were good, he thought, so it was worth the walk. His bag brimmed with notebooks and pastels. It was his introduction to art.
Since then, Cauley-Stein has graduated from a schoolboy drawing houses and landscapes to a 27-year-old using spray paint — and acrylic paint when he wants to get more intricate — to work on his canvases. It’s all a vessel for expressing his feelings about relationships, heroes and life as a veteran center with the Dallas Mavericks. Cauley-Stein, who became a father in July, decided not to finish last season in the bubble, then declined his player option with the Mavericks before re-signing with Dallas for two more years. That journey, he says, is represented in his art. But for many, an NBA life is separate from a creative one.
According to Cauley-Stein, that is by design. The league’s decision-makers, he says, often want complete devotion to the game. If you’re known for drawing freehand instead of practicing your free throws, it’s a bad career move. “They put that tag on you,” says Cauley-Stein, the sixth overall pick in the 2015 draft, now on his third team in six seasons. “‘Well, you don’t love basketball because you do other things.’ You’re like, ‘What?’ I bet there are a lot more [artists in the NBA than we know about] just for that reason — they don’t want people to know.”
Brad Townsend: NBA L2M report says Jokic should have been called for 3 seconds with 26.5 seconds left in regulation; but also that Barton was incorrectly called for fouling WCS with 1 minute left in OT; and WCS should have been called for fouling Murray with 22 seconds left in OT. Carry on.
That play didn’t win the Mavs the game — Denver’s Nikola Jokic, a proven premier closer, finished his clutch scoring flurry with an OT-forcing jumper over Willie Cauley-Stein at the regulation buzzer — but Dallas definitely would have lost without it. “Everybody [on the Mavs] trusts every teammate,” said Doncic, who was a rebound shy of his second straight triple-double. “I think it was a great shot. Even if he would missed it, it was a great shot. I’ll do it every day.”
