Ask anyone who has ever coached Cason Wallace to pinpoint the precise moment in which they knew this guy was that guy — the kind of star who can carry an entire team if necessary — and they all have a story they can’t wait to tell. For Kevin Lawson, Wallace’s coach at Richardson (Texas) High School, it was the night they knocked off the nationally-ranked eventual state champion, Duncanville, in a holiday tournament last season. Blue-chip recruits who signed with the likes of Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Memphis and Texas were on the floor that night. Wallace, now a freshman guard at Kentucky, outplayed all of them.
“Cason’s not scared of anybody. Actually, he loved that,” Lawson says. “And he just dominated that game. That’s when everyone knew he was the dude. When it’s big-time basketball, big-time moments, he’s not scared. That’s why I’m excited to see him in the NCAA Tournament in a few months, because that’s when the sky will be the limit for him. That’s the kind of moment when he’ll say, ‘OK, this is it. I’m taking this on.’”
Five-star forward Ron Holland kept Duncanville close that night, but Richardson led by four with 5:51 to go in regulation. Then suddenly, a rumble went through the crowd. Five-star guard Anthony Black, now a freshman at Arkansas, had been tangled up in a legal battle to become eligible after transferring from another high school, and he’d apparently gotten word late in the game that he was cleared to play. Right then seemed as good a time as any to make his grand entrance, so he did. Lawson called a timeout just to send his own team a message: Look at that. They’re scared of us.
“Cason just looked at me and said, ‘I got you. I’ll take this thing over.’ And he did,” Lawson says. Wallace went right at Black on the first play and drew a foul. Then he blocked Black’s shot on the other end. Then sank a driving layup for the lead. Then swished a contested floater with 15 seconds left in regulation, which Holland matched to force overtime, where Wallace drove and scored to tie the game with 1:35 to go and attacked again to draw a foul with 45.7 seconds left. “He just carried us,” Lawson says. “Every possession at the end, it was him. We put him in a ball screen every time and got a mismatch and he just killed them. He gave us one of the biggest wins we’ve had in school history — and gave them the only loss they took all year.”
Ask anyone who has ever coached Wallace whether Kentucky ought to now effectively give him the ball and get out of the way, and they’ll all couch their response in the usual well, I’m a little biased way. But none can contain their opinion: Yes, the Wildcats should. That doesn’t necessarily mean demoting senior point guard Sahvir Wheeler, who is well on his way to leading the SEC in assists for a third straight season. It just means that when Kentucky badly needs a bucket, Wallace is probably that guy. It means that, for a team that has looked offensively challenged at times against top competition and is still struggling to define its identity, John Calipari could do a lot worse than handing Wallace the keys and letting him dictate who these Cats become.
Yes, Oscar Tshiebwe is the reigning national player of the year, a reliable double-double machine inside, but it’s no secret that guard play wins in March. See the 30-point, 16-rebound Tshiebwe performance in a first-round loss to Saint Peter’s last season. Kentucky’s leading man needs a co-star on the perimeter, and Wallace offers the best hope of giving him one.
“Every time that he’s aggressive and making plays, they’re better,” Lawson says. “You kind of know what you’re going to get with Oscar. You kind of know that your shooters are a little hit-or-miss, not as consistent as you’d like. But Cason is the guy who can take it to the next level, and he’s got even more than what we’ve seen. I think he’s really been trying to feel it out on offense while he’s killing it on defense and making a name for himself that way, but there’s so much more he can give them. If they ask him to, he can average 20 a game. So yeah, I think Kentucky’s ceiling is Cason.”
In his first college game, Wallace filled in for an injured Wheeler and flirted with a triple-double: 15 points, nine assists, eight rebounds. In his first high-level college game, against Michigan State in the Champions Classic, he tied a school record for steals (eight) to go with 14 points, five rebounds and five assists. He had 14 points on just nine shots and swiped four more steals at Gonzaga.
“I had butterflies at first,” Wallace says of those early opportunities under the bright lights, “but confidence was running high. Nerves don’t necessarily mean something bad. There’s good butterflies, just knowing that you’re fixing to go play in a big game in front of a lot of people. That’s a dream come true.”
He relished that chance again Sunday in London, where in just his eighth college game Wallace led Kentucky (6-2) to its first quality win of the season against Michigan. The former McDonald’s All-American delivered 14 points, eight rebounds, five assists, a block, a steal and hit all four of his 3-point tries, including the dagger with just over a minute left.
“No surprise,” Wolverines coach Juwan Howard told reporters afterward. “Young fella knows how to play. I’ve watched enough of his games. I’ve seen what he’s capable of doing. He made some big shots when they needed it.”
Cason Wallace CLUTCH! pic.twitter.com/gfNu37XAMT
— Kentucky Men’s Basketball (@KentuckyMBB) December 4, 2022
With Kentucky leading by just a point at halftime, Calipari challenged Wallace to be more aggressive. He clearly understood the assignment. In the first two minutes and 16 seconds of the second half, Wallace drilled a jumper, snared a defensive rebound, blocked a shot and sank back-to-back 3s. The Wildcats’ lead had ballooned to eight before fans had time to get back from the concession stand.
“He does a little bit of everything,” Calipari said afterward. “He’s a player who doesn’t care about scoring. He got the MVP, I guess, but he doesn’t care. When you’re so worried about all the stuff that really doesn’t matter, that messes your game up. Just play.”
Wallace is good at that, clearing out the clutter, as Calipari often calls it. He’s averaging 11 points, 4.6 assists, 4.1 rebounds and 2.1 steals, shooting 53.1 percent from the field and 50 percent from 3-point range, but he doesn’t want to talk about any of that. He doesn’t like to watch his highlights or feast on praise from fans.
“I’d rather see the bad,” he says, nodding his head at the suggestion he needs to work on free throws after missing a handful in crunch time against Michigan and Michigan State. He could practically hear his mother, a free-throw stickler, screaming through the television about those. “The good is gonna be all over social media. The bad isn’t really put out there,” he says, so he seeks it out to learn from his mistakes. But he isn’t paralyzed by them. He isn’t afraid to make them.
Wallace has a simplified approach to the game, one that makes Calipari grin. Just as former star Tyrese Maxey used to do, Wallace bounds into practice every day with a smile on his face and asks his coach to see a little more energy.
“I want people to watch me and think I was the most energized player out there, that I gave my all every time I was on the court,” he says. “When you have a player like that, you can’t really be mad at them even when they make a mistake. Every team has to have a guy with a motor or there will be days you don’t get better — and you have to get better every single day — so I just try to have a great spirit, go in there ready to work, ready to be around my guys and practice hard. Sometimes you don’t want to be there, but you need to be there, so it takes the right attitude. I’m kind of a quiet guy, but if somebody’s feeling down, I’m going to pick them up.”
Carry them, if necessary. That is exactly what this Kentucky team needs, one of Calipari’s old-school freshman stars who can, by sheer force of will, seize control of a moment and drag everyone else along for the ride. Wallace, who is 6-foot-4 and built like an NFL safety, looks the part. What he did against Michigan made it clear he can play the part too.
“I know what he is,” Calipari said afterward.
He didn’t always, but an old friend tried to tell Calipari for a long time. Jeff Webster, mentor to former Kentucky star Julius Randle, coached Wallace on the Nike grassroots circuit and kept telling Calipari that Wallace could be his next star. Seeing is believing, though, and everyone has their own “Aha!” moment in this story. For Calipari, it was the summer of 2021, when he showed up to watch No. 1-ranked Shaedon Sharpe, a top-10 pick in the last NBA Draft. Wallace had 20 points on 10 shots, plus nine assists and seven rebounds, as his team routed Sharpe’s that day.
“I fell in love with him,” Calipari says of that performance. “That’s where I said, ‘OK, we gotta have this kid.’ He went against Shaedon and went right at him. No fear and really physically and every other way was like, I’m going to prove I’m better. I called his AAU coach and I said, ‘Jeff, he’s better than I thought.’ (Jeff said), ‘I told you! I told you! He’s a warrior, this kid!’”
Cason Wallace has stuffed the stat sheet during the first eight games of his college career. (Jordan Prather / USA Today)
Wallace’s ProSkills team went 12-1 on the Nike circuit, its only loss coming to the Peach Jam champion. His Richardson High team went 32-2 his senior season, when he averaged 19.9 points, 7.4 rebounds, 6.1 assists, 2.4 steals and 1.5 blocks, and got knocked out of the playoffs in a most ironic way. Wallace, the state’s player of the year, blocked what would’ve been a game-winning shot, only to see it land in another opposing player’s hands right under the basket in time to beat the buzzer. It was a brutally bad beat, especially for a guy who lost just three out of 47 competitive games between the end of his junior year of high school and the start of his college career.
“I’m just a player who wants to win,” Wallace says. “I don’t really care about anything else.”
The morning after his high school career ended, he met Lawson at the gym to work on his free throws. That surprised no one who knows Wallace. His cousin, former Oklahoma State guard Terrel Harris, has been training him since his professional career ended. That was around seventh grade for Wallace. Harris was a Big 12 All-Defense selection in 2009 and played in 46 NBA games — he got a championship ring with the Miami Heat in 2012 — plus stops in France, Germany and Israel. Wallace’s 23-year-old brother, Keaton, was a three-time All-Conference USA guard and is now a standout for the best team in the NBA’s G League. Harris’ brother, Kendal Yancy, played four years at Texas.
“We used to play one-on-one,” Harris says. “I don’t really mess with him no more. It’s just so hard to go by him and I’m getting older now. I have to, like, prepare for him. Make sure my knees are iced and my game is tight or he’ll embarrass me. It’s hard to go by that kid, man. You think you got him beat or got a clean look, but he’s either blocking it or you run into his chest and he’s so strong, he doesn’t move. He doesn’t get shook. And now his offensive bag got really tight, too. Like, dang, I can’t go by him and it’s hard to guard him. He’s a different animal now.”
In the summertime, Wallace and Harris train Monday through Friday, anywhere from an hour to two hours per session. Those have gotten shorter and more specific as Wallace has grown as a player. He has such a professional approach now, they can get very specific skill work done in minimal time. Even before Wallace’s game was this refined, though, the potential was obvious. Naturally, Harris tells one of the earliest, “Oh, he’s different” moments about his cousin.
His freshman year at Richardson, District 8 was loaded. The overall MVP was a senior named Drew Timme of Pearce High. The district offensive and defensive MVPs — top-50 recruits Jahmi’us Ramsey and Micah Peavy — were at Duncanville. And the newcomer of the year was a 14-year-old named Cason Wallace.
“Those guys were all in his conference and he was going at them, neck-and-neck, as a freshman,” Harris says. “I was like: This is the start of something special. He was never going to back down just because you were the older guy.”
But Wallace might defer, at least initially, to older players on his own team. That’s not about fear, rather respect. Early on at Richardson, a freshman Wallace hesitated to assert his dominance on a roster full of juniors and seniors. It eventually required a nudge from the coach, a gentle reminder that those other guys were fine players but he was the difference-maker.
“He’s a real good kid, as good as they come, and he’s a team guy, so he’s not going to come in and step on people’s toes,” Lawson says. “He kind of lets his game do the talking at first. It might be a slow process for him to take control and understand that he can’t take a back seat and be a nice guy forever, because there’s too much potential in him and Kentucky needs him. If he heard that from the coaches there, I don’t think it would hurt, but I also think deep down, he knows. Because winning is the most important thing to him, and now he’s starting to get more of a feel for what they need from him to win.”
Calipari often says his best players are even-keeled and one of the things he admires most in Wallace is how in-control he is of his own emotions. Whether he’s making or missing shots, whether teammates fail to find him for an open look or he gets beat by his man, Wallace maintains a steady demeanor. At least outwardly.
“He’s a monster inside,” Harris says. “He’s definitely not going to want to lose games and waste a season, so eventually he’s going to take over. My advice to him was: Establish your ground early, let them know who you are early, and get your respect. I think he has that respect now. Eventually, those guys will count on him a little bit more, and he’ll be ready to step up. He understands what’s going on, how they’re using him. He’s not an arrogant person, so he’s just going to let it play out. But when that conference season comes, when every game is heavy hitters, I think you’re going to see a different person.”
When that day comes, some NBA coach who’ll eventually draft Wallace will have his own “when I knew” moment. Everyone does.
(Illustration by John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos: Jeff Moreland and Andy Lyons / Getty Images)
