The pinky finger on Alex Caruso’s right hand doesn’t look like a typical pinky. Around the middle knuckle, it bulges as if a small marble was implanted under the skin. It will come as no surprise to anyone who’s watched Caruso play basketball that this slight disfiguration is the result of him throwing his body around the court.
“Somebody stepped on it while I was on the ground during a game,” Caruso said during a phone interview before the 2025 NBA Finals. What might be surprising, though, is how old he was when the injury occurred.
“I think it was in, like, the first or second grade,” he said.
So, yes, the player we’ve seen throughout the playoffs, and in his first season with the Oklahoma City Thunder, and really over the past five seasons, is who Caruso has always been. The running, the diving, the swiping, that blur of activity that looks like a tornado with arms — it all comes naturally to him. On the court, it’s Caruso’s version of breathing.
(James Pawelczyk/Yahoo Sports Illustration)
“I remember when he first started playing with us,” recalled Jason Bullard, a medical equipment salesman who was part of a group of 30- and 40-year-olds from the College Station, Texas area, with whom Caruso played pick-up with while in middle school. “He’d run around, guard everybody, take the ball and go, and just create all sorts of chaos,” Bullard added. “Some guys would even get annoyed. It’d be like, ‘Who’s this little kid running around trying to steal the ball from us every time?”
Caruso had joined the game — consisting of local businessmen, blue collar workers, a professor at Texas A&M — after stumbling upon it one night at the park down the road from his house. He’d skip dinner, show up with his own ball 30 minutes before they’d begin and pretend he was there to shoot around, all in the hope that they’d need one more. Within about a year, he was a regular.
That capacity for wreaking havoc on the court is what propelled Caruso, now 31, from an undrafted guard in 2016, one close to accepting a contract to play overseas, into the NBA. But what’s transformed him into into one of the great role players of this decade, someone who, following the Thunder’s 123-107 series-tying Game 2 victory over the Indiana Pacers in Sunday night’s Finals matchup, is now just three wins away from a second ring, has been his ability to both build on those skills and refine them. These days, Caruso is more than just a basketball version of the Tasmanian Devil. In fact, ask him about his style propensity for creating chaos and he’ll balk at that description.
“I think when you use the word ‘chaos,’ it’s for the other team,” he said. “Creating chaos for them and making them have to think and second-guess things.
“For us, I’m trying to be settling and create a rhythm and flow.” More than that, Caruso added, he’s trying to “have an understanding of what we’re gonna do and then putting guys in positions where they can just play and don’t have to think.”
It took time for Caruso to reach this point. “He needed to refine that risk/reward balance that he has down so well now,” said Coby Karl, who coached Caruso in the Lakers’ G League program. Karl remembers speaking to current Thunder head coach Mark Daigneault during the 2017-18 season, when Daigneault was leading the Thunder’s G League team. The conversation turned to Caruso, who had spent the previous season with Daigneault before being let go by the Thunder. “He described him as Brett Favre,” Karl recalled. “It was like, whether he was trying to thread a needle on a pass or jump a passing lane for a steal, he was always going to go for it.”
When Caruso reunited with Daigneault on the Thunder last summer following a trade from the Chicago Bulls, he had become the 2.0 version of himself, a player whose ability to process the game has become as essential to his ability to impact it. Thunder coaches and players have marveled all year at how well Caruso is both able to absorb game plans and identify the strengths and weaknesses of opposing players. It’s why so many credit him for the Thunder’s leap from fourth in defensive rating last season to first this season — despite Caruso averaging just 19.2 minutes per game in the regular season.
[Mark Daignault] described him as Brett Favre. Whether he was trying to thread a needle on a pass or jump a passing lane for a steal, he was always going to go for it.
“One of the most important things that he’s come in here and taught us is the importance of executing the details,” Thunder big man Chet Holmgren said before the Finals. “You’ll see so many times he makes a huge play out there, and it really comes down to inches. Was he in the right spot by a few inches? Was he able to reach the ball and poke it away by a few inches? That comes down to knowing where you need to be and when you need to be there, what you need to do and how to execute it. He’s really come in and preached the importance of that, kind of shown us firsthand what that looks like.”
It’s been a role-reversal for Caruso. Last time he was playing for a contender was with the Lakers during the 2019-20 season, when he was the newbie trying to soak up as much as possible from veteran teammates. There, Caruso was able to earn the equivalent of an NBA master’s degree. The key, he said, was having the confidence to speak up and share his thoughts, despite being a 25-year-old out of the G League.
“I wasn’t afraid to be wrong,” he said, “and that helped me grow. A lot of times you get corrected through mistakes.”
In LA, playing alongside LeBron James and Anthony Davis, Caruso perfected the role of wingman to the stars. Lakers coaches marveled at how on defense he’d often predict on which plays LeBron preferred to stay home and then make his rotation for him, or on offense how he seemed to know precisely when to make an off-ball cut not to receive the ball himself but to trigger a shift that would benefit a teammate. And of course there were the more obvious plays, the 3s and fast breaks and steals and deflections. Caruso became one of the most feared defenders in the league, a key cog in the Lakers’ 2020 title run.
Alex Caruso played a critical role for the Lakers during their 2020 title run. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
By the time he left as a free agent for the Bulls in 2021, Caruso was ready to lead an NBA team on his own. Like in LA, his basketball IQ awed Chicago’s coaching staff, as did the way he’d just step onto the court with, in the words of former Bulls assistant Josh Longstaff, “an infectious energy.”
But what impressed the group the most was his understanding of how to communicate with teammates. Say a player was having difficulty absorbing a scheme or concept during a walkthrough the morning of a game. “If it’s somebody who could be coached hard, he’d give them, like, a stern ‘Come on!’ clap and say, ‘We need to get this right!’” Longstaff said. “And if it’s someone who needed to be approached more gently, he’d take his time, pull him aside and say something along the lines of, ‘We need you for this game, if you get in the game, we need you to do this and this,’ and he’d do all this while putting his arm on their shoulder.”
The Bulls gave Caruso a bigger role, and he responded with his best statistical seasons, along with a pair of All-Defensive team honors. Chicago, however, wasn’t ready to compete for a title. The Thunder were — and they were looking for one more piece to help snap their championship puzzle into place. General manager Sam Presti, who had let Caruso walk eight years earlier, believed Caruso was it. Because of the skills he’d always possessed but also the new ones he’d added along the way.
“I think it helps elevate the whole group if you can have those types of brains, and we really wanted the heart and the head in the building,” Presti said during a preseason press conference after acquiring Caruso in a trade for 21-year-old point guard Josh Giddey.
Presti’s evaluation and instincts turned out to be right. On the court, Caruso’s impact is evident. The Thunder’s already historic point-differential improves when he’s playing. He’s spent the playoffs shadowing, and locking down, players of all skills and sizes, from explosive guards like Ja Morant, to bruising giants like Nikola Jokic. No NBA player has deflected more passes per possession this postseason. He’s drilled more than 40% of his triples. In December, the Thunder signed him to a four-year, $81 million extension.
But ask Caruso to name some of the moments he’s most proud of, and he’ll point to a game where he scored just two points in less than 10 minutes of action. It was Game 2 of the second round. The Thunder were facing the Nuggets, and coming off a crushing 121-119 home loss, one in which the Thunder had blown a double-digit lead. In the locker room afterward, Caruso could sense “some angst and frustration from the guys,” he said. It reminded him of his 2020 title run, when the Lakers had dropped the first game in each of the first two rounds.
“I remember very specifically having those conversations with LeBron, [Rajon] Rondo and the other older guys during that run,” Caruso said. “And their basic message was, ‘We’re going to go back and watch film and we’ll see that we messed up game plan stuff, and that’s all easy to fix.” And so here he was, sitting in a cold tub following a Game 1 playoff loss five years later, ready to impart the same lesson.
“I said to the group, ‘It was our mistakes. We gave it to them, we’re gonna correct it, and it will be fine,’” he recalled. The Thunder came out the next game and ran the Nuggets off the floor in a 43-point win.
Following their Game 1 loss in the Finals, the Thunder were back in a similar situation. And once again, Caruso was a calming influence for the group. When speaking to reporters the day after the loss, he singled out a few areas where he believed the Thunder could improve — “being a little more efficient in transition and maybe not forcing it at the rim and playing off two feet early in the game and spraying the ball a little” — but he made clear that he wasn’t alarmed.
Two days later, the Thunder were back on the floor, and this time Caruso decided he was going to take matters into his own hands. He was everywhere, swarming ball-handlers and blowing up screens and flying up and down the court and draining 3s. He finished with 20 points — a mark he never hit during the regular season — in 27 minutes of action off the bench, including four 3s, propelling Oklahoma City to victory.
After the game, a reporter asked Holmgren about Caruso’s “energy levels for a 30-year-old man.”
Holmgren smiled as he contemplated how to respond.
“Don’t disrespect our GOAT like that,” he said.
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