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.
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“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?”
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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.
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“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.”
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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…
Yaron Weitzman
