Willie Cauley-Stein: Phoenix Suns 2015 Draft Profile

Weaknesses

Okay. So it’s not all posters and rejections for Cauley-Stein. There are three main reasons he’s not really being considered in the top-four range of the draft:  his offensive polish his drive and his personality.

There are other things that are question marks, like whether or not he will fill out weight-wise or if he has the potential to be a really good rebounder or just an okay one, but the fact of the matter is that every prospect is going to have flaws.

And if he didn’t have the concerns on offense and with his mindset, there’d be no doubt about him as a prospect. He’d basically be as perfect as it gets, so I’m not going to focus on the little ones as much as the big ones.

Let’s take the three main weaknesses one at a time.

Offense 

Cauley-Stein has almost no polish to his offensive game, which certainly could create some spacing problems at the next level.

Now, DraftExpress credits Cauley-Stein with an improved midrange game, which is certainly accurate, but it’s still not to the point where it needs to be. In fact, that goes for pretty much his entire game on offense, outside of 10 feet or so.

All U Can Heat

According to DraftExpress, Cauley-Stein shot 11-of-22 on jumpers last season, meaning that he was INCREDIBLY selective, averaging just one attempted jump shot for every 46 minutes he was on the court. That selectiveness caused his percentage to look way better than the actual quality of shooter he is, but it did give some hope that he could someday have at least a passible midrange game.

One area where Cauley-Stein really struggled was the free throw line, although it’s worth noting he improved by over 10 percent in that area in both his sophomore and junior seasons. Cauley-Stein left Kentucky as a career 51.7 percent free throw shooter, but he actually shot right around 62 percent in his final season while attempting more than 40 more free throws than he’d attempted any other year.

However, 60 percent from the line still isn’t good enough, nor are the mechanics on his jumper, and that doesn’t even begin to touch on his lack of a post game.

According to DraftExpress, Cauley-Stein averaged fewer than 0.8 points per possession on post-ups, mostly due to the fact that he doesn’t really have a good go-to or fallback move. Whereas most big men have a hook or an up-and-under or a fadeaway or something they can turn to, Cauley-Stein doesn’t have any real moves in the post. As was pointed out on a couple of different sites, that allowed teams to stick a smaller defender on him without facing any repercussions.

It’s also worth noting that Cauley-Stein isn’t exactly an elite passer either. He averaged less than one assist per game, although a lot of that was due to the pace and style that Kentucky played. As a team, the Wildcats ranked 41st in assists per game in the regular season, and somehow they got even worse in postseason play, where they averaged just 9.2 per game (ranked 120th in the nation).

Regardless, that means teams can basically either back off of him and force him to shoot or trap him without fear of a crosscourt pass out of the post to an open shooter. At least for now.

Drive

Now it’s actually worth mentioning here that I graduated from the same high school as Cauley-Stein, and while we didn’t overlap, I’ve definitely learned a lot from the people who knew him well. And I’ve found in talking to them, the one thing that gets brought up time and time again was his drive.

Take this into account:

Willie Cauley-Stein was a seven-footer in the Sunflower League (which is not considered to be a top high school basketball league in any way), yet he only averaged about nine rebounds per game in his best season. To give you an idea of how big a seven-footer is in the Sunflower league, the year AFTER Cauley-Stein left for Kentucky, there were exactly zero players left on Olathe Northwest that were taller than 6’5″.

But that doesn’t change the facts.

Cauley-Stein was far from dominant in his time at Olathe Northwest. He doesn’t hold the school record for points in a game. He doesn’t hold the record for points in a season.

Those distinctions belong to Trey Bales and Shavon Shields. The former plays at Avilla University in Kansas City. The latter plays for Nebraska.

Additionally, the Kansas City Star didn’t name him to either of the first or second All-Metro teams while he was at Olathe Northwest, because, well, he wasn’t deserving. In fact, Cauley-Stein actually holds more football records, playing wide receiver, than anything else.

People question his drive. And without knowing him personally, I can’t exactly dispel those concerns; the numbers certainly seem to support them, in fact. And while he did show massive improvement as a defender year-to-year in college, and as a player overall, the drive simply wasn’t visible on a game-to-game basis in his last year at Kentucky.

It wasn’t there when he was a sophomore in college, either.

Or when he was a freshman.

Or in high school.

Take his play in the SEC as an example. In one game against Texas A&M, fighting to preserve a perfect season in a double overtime thriller, Cauley-Stein came away with just four points and six rebounds. Then a couple of weeks later, against South Carolina, he went for just two points and four rebounds.

One might have expected him to bounce back, but in the very next game, which was against a horrible Missouri team that finished the year at 9-23, losing 13 straight at one point, Cauley-Stein managed just two points and three rebounds. And to top it all off, later in the year against Georgia, he went for just four points and four boards.

Once again, the seven-footer was far from dominant. He didn’t really show that killer mentality. But some of that may just be about who Cauley-Stein is as a person. For better or for worse, he’s different, although that reportedly has scared some GMs away.

Personality 

Willie Cauley-Stein is a character.

Okay, so maybe he’s not as crazy as that Photoshop might suggest, but between dying his hair blonde (and then right back), changing his middle name to “Trill” and even refusing to shake the hands of the Wisconsin players following Kentucky’s Final Four loss, he’s done some things that have concerned NBA front offices.

(Although seriously, if we can go back for a second, the Slim Shady hair was just a bad idea all around.)

In fact, it’s almost funny that it’s Sacramento that appears to have the biggest interest in him, at least early in the draft, because if paired with DeMarcus Cousins, the two could form an impossibly dominant frontline, or simply create fireworks that would make Kings games must-see-TV.

One anonymous GM really summed it all up in talking to Chad Ford, when he said Cauley-Stein could potentially “be one of the two or three best players in the draft,” but that there was also potential “for him to be Larry Sanders.” And while it seems that Cauley-Stein is committed, and probably not headed down the exact same route that Sanders took, the questions are there, and they are legitimate.

After all, every kid is different. With Cauley-Stein, for the NBA general managers, it’s just a question of how different.

Next: Potential Fit