The Answer to Every Question Is Alex Caruso
He’s the NBA’s most turbulent and versatile defender—and he just might be the best, too. From Joker to Ant to the Pacers, there’s no opponent the Thunder’s do-it-all sixth man can’t solve.The Answer to Every Question Is Alex Caruso
He’s the NBA’s most turbulent and versatile defender—and he just might be the best, too. From Joker to Ant to the Pacers, there’s no opponent the Thunder’s do-it-all sixth man can’t solve.
Alex Caruso did something earlier this postseason that very few ever will: He tricked Nikola Jokic. It happened in Game 1 between the Oklahoma City Thunder and Denver Nuggets on a baseline out of bounds play. Defending Aaron Gordon near the block, Caruso not only knew that the ball was going to Jokic, but also had a feeling what the smartest player on the planet might do with it.
“I knew if I bluffed and jumped at him he would try to quick pass it to Gordon,” Caruso recalled a few weeks later. Sure enough, as Oklahoma City’s most experienced veteran, his instincts were right. “He ended up throwing it right to me. I don’t think I could make that play three, four, five years ago. … You learn tendencies, you’re able to anticipate stuff.”
The play was artful deception at its best and, being that it came against Jokic, as rare as it gets. But it wasn’t the last time Caruso would get the better of Denver’s three-time MVP. A couple of weeks later, in Game 7, the 6-foot-5, 190-pound guard was an ace up the Thunder’s sleeve. Despite giving up over six inches and a couple of heavy sandbags in weight, Caruso was still the best option on a roster that could cobble together its own All-Defensive team; with Oklahoma City’s season on the line, he spent critical, significant stretches guarding Jokic with more tenaciousness and less compromise than just about anyone else alive can.
Beginning with just over four minutes left in the first quarter and the Thunder down double digits, the world’s best player did not know peace. Caruso denied every entry pass into the post and constantly stabbed at the ball when Jokic touched it. It was a remarkable, tone-changing performance, filled with possessions that made you wonder how many people in the NBA could do what Caruso did.
“He knows what his advantages are and then he plays to that,” Thunder big Chet Holmgren said. “He’s scrappy. He was using his speed and his pace to keep Jokic from feeling comfortable and knowing where he was. Without him, the game looks completely different.”
He knows what his advantages are and then he plays to that. He’s scrappy. ... Without him, the game looks completely different.Chet Holmgren
When Oklahoma City GM Sam Presti traded for Caruso last summer, he probably didn’t picture him neutralizing Jokic in a Game 7. If that were the case, there’s a slight chance he would not have given a three-year, $87 million contract to an agile Toyota Tacoma like Isaiah Hartenstein. Slowing Jokic down is a group effort, but the Thunder would be on vacation right now if it weren’t for Caruso. Instead, after acquiring him last summer in a widely lauded swap for Josh Giddey that instantly solved several problems the Thunder weren’t able to overcome as a no. 1 seed last postseason, Oklahoma City is now three wins from a championship.
Through two games against the Indiana Pacers in the NBA Finals, Caruso has often appeared to be in two places at once, darting into gaps, cutting off driving lanes, closing out on shooters, contesting their shots, and corralling ball handlers in isolation. Along with scoring 20 points in Game 2, he also exiled Andrew Nembhard, sped up Pascal Siakam, and was a huge reason Indiana couldn’t get into the paint.
Caruso has been a Venus flytrap with legs long before this playoff run began, but everything he’s done to elevate Oklahoma City’s defense—under elevated stakes, at the absolute peak of his powers—has helped normalize statements that might seem hyperbolic even to those who were already familiar with his abilities. On top of ranking first in defensive estimated plus-minus (for the second time in three years) this season, Caruso also finished second among rotation players in “total field goal difference percentage”—which measures the difference in opponent field goal percentage when he contested any shot on the court—and fifth in total points saved per 100 contests (minimum 1,000 minutes).
Despite enjoying an offensive golden age, the NBA is loaded with elite individual defenders who excel in areas that make them great. Victor Wembanyama, Evan Mobley, and Draymond Green all deter scoring at an elite rate. But it’s fair to think that nobody checks more boxes than Caruso, whose all-around ability to affect any kind of play, against any kind of player, is uncanny. He can chase an elite shooter off the ball. He can make a high-usage superstar’s life miserable. He can wrestle centers in the post. He can avoid screens guarding a pick-and-roll. He can switch onto any position and not require help. He can flip an entire game’s momentum by deflecting a pass, stripping a driver, taking a charge, or communicating to teammates on the fly with a helpful instruction.
“He knows where all 10 guys are supposed to be,” Thunder star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander said. “He plays defense off of feel and awareness, almost like a lot of guys play offense. It's pretty special to see up close and personal every day. It's literally a talent of his, to feel the game the way he does defensively.”
For all those reasons and so many others, whether the Thunder win their first title or come up short, Caruso should be recognized as the most turbulent, versatile, and infectious defender in the world. To take it one step further, when we talk about the premier defenders of this entire generation, Caruso should be one of the first names, if not the first name, mentioned.
Whether you agree or not is beside the point. Merely discussing him in this context is a remarkable achievement for a 31-year-old who ranked 81st in his high school recruiting class, went undrafted after spending four years at Texas A&M, and then played 106 games in the G League—50 of them as a rookie for Thunder coach Mark Daigneault, who at the time was head coach of the Oklahoma City Blue. He remembers watching Caruso get “torched” by Russell Westbrook in his first training camp. “I was like, man, that was gory,” Daigneault said. “Now, it’s amazing what he’s done because he can handle all the matchups. I think it’s because he’s really studied the league, learned how to play angles, tendencies. He’s like an encyclopedia on that end of the floor. There was that famous article about [Shane] Battier in whatever outlet that was. He’s like that. Kind of a computer on that end of the floor.”
Caruso spent the 2016-17 season playing for the Blue and then agreed to a two-way contract with the Los Angeles Lakers in July. In 2019, the Lakers signed him to a guaranteed two-year, $5.5 million deal. It proved wise. That year, Caruso became a reliable role player for a Lakers team that went to the bubble and won it all. (LeBron James recently called Caruso “one of my favorite teammates of all time … the ultimate Swiss Army knife.”) During that playoff run, only four Lakers played more minutes than Caruso, and the 103.6 points per 100 possessions they allowed with him on the court was a team low.
A year later, after he finished third overall in defensive estimated plus-minus, L.A. let Caruso walk in free agency—despite him saying he would’ve taken less money to stay. (The Lakers decided Talen Horton-Tucker was a wiser long-term investment.)
From there, Caruso spent three years with the Chicago Bulls, with whom he made two All-Defensive teams. During his first season in Chicago, assistant coach Josh Longstaff (who was with the Bulls from 2020 to 2024 and is now with the Charlotte Hornets) remembers the pride Caruso took in his craft, even when it came to stopping teammates in practice. “He wanted to guard Zach [LaVine],” he said. “He wanted to guard DeMar [DeRozan]. And it’s just kind of who he is.”
Great defenders make minutiae feel momentous. That’s Caruso in a nutshell. The Bulls finished 23rd in defensive rating during Caruso’s first season, largely because he fractured his wrist on the wrong end of a dirty play that January. The following season, Chicago had the fifth-best defense in the league. Caruso’s impact was undeniable. According to databallr.com, from 2022 to 2024, lineups featuring DeRozan, LaVine, and Nikola Vucevic (but not Caruso) registered a defensive rating that was 4.5 points worse than the league average. When those three played with Caruso, Chicago’s defensive rating was 3.6 points per 100 possessions better than league average.
His energy was infectious, but his value was even more noticeable during film sessions, as one of Chicago’s most educative voices, constantly letting teammates know how effective they could be when they weren’t guarding the ball. Caruso would tell LaVine where to stand behind the play, so that the ball handler would see a crowd instead of a gap. Then he’d turn around and let DeMar know where he could stand to help Zach. “He just kind of had a way of letting guys know, almost like: ‘I’ll do all the hard shit for you, on the ball, chasing these guys around,’” Longstaff said. “‘You just need your positioning to be really good. Communication has gotta be good. And we’ll help each other do our jobs a little bit better.’”
Trying to stop a pick-and-roll, Caruso makes life so much easier for whoever’s guarding the screen by refusing to get hit. In Oklahoma City, where the bigs are pretty mobile, that elusiveness makes scoring on the Thunder next to impossible. In Chicago, when he was partnered up with Vooch, it was a life-saver:
“He’s got an aura to him defensively,” Longstaff said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, we’re going to be fine because we’ve got Alex out there’ … especially on that team in Chicago, we didn’t have a ton of defensive-minded guys. It really stuck out.”
Now with the Thunder and back in the Finals, Caruso has a chance to display the traits that make him so great—and to do so on the largest stage basketball has to offer for a 68-win team that boasts one of the most ravenous defenses in league history. Caruso is an oil spill that contaminates the opponent’s strategy one play at a time. Whether battling Jokic in the post, hounding Anthony Edwards on the perimeter, or refusing to be screened off whichever Pacer he’s shadowing, Caruso is as malleable on the ball as he is reliable helping off of it.
He’s got an aura to him defensively. It’s like, ‘Hey, we’re going to be fine because we’ve got Alex out there.’Josh Longstaff
“My last year or two in Chicago, there was a week stretch where I guarded Giannis and Zion and then Steph and Ja, so it just comes with the nature of it,” Caruso said last month. “I’ve gotten a lot of experience guarding that. And then earlier this year me and [Jalen Williams] were playing the 5, so a lot of post work. Invaluable experience that’s paying dividends now for us.”
The beauty of Caruso is that he has no tangible weaknesses. His game is filled with qualities that directly impact every possession in a positive way. There’s intelligence, intuition, and persistence. There’s physicality, sacrifice, and quickness. There’s leadership, direction, and influence. If you could pick any one defender to blow up a critical play by switching through all five positions, or rotate early off his man to plug a lane before it opens up, it would be him. “When we would scout, we’d always get the numbers, like, who were the best defenders on [Tyrese] Haliburton, [Jalen] Brunson, you know, whoever, and I mean, 95 percent of the guys were like ‘Ah, Caruso’s the best defender,’” Longstaff said.
At the same time, if you could pick anyone in the league to enter your locker room and improve your defensive culture over the course of an entire season, it’d also be Caruso. He’s an indispensable torch bearer who, behind the scenes, teaches and reinforces everything that actually matters to his younger teammates. “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?” Holmgren said. “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.”
There are many numbers—not all of which can be listed here—that insist he’s been basketball’s most disruptive defender for a long time. Let’s look at just a few: In every season of Caruso’s career, his team’s defense has been incredible with him on the court and significantly worse when he’s off it, according to Cleaning the Glass. Over the past five years, Caruso ranks first in regularized adjusted plus-minus (RAPM), a metric that shows how players impact the scoreboard over a large sample size instead of relying on individual counting stats. In 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2025, he ranked in the 99th percentile. (In 2024, he plummeted all the way down to 98th.)
So much of that is thanks to the havoc that he generates with his active hands. In a database that stretches back 28 years, Caruso ranks first among all players who’ve logged at least 15,000 possessions in “regularized adjusted defensive turnover rate” and “relative forced turnovers.” In other words, he puts opponents under more duress than just about any defender you can think of. Snatching the ball from someone else is Caruso’s raison d’être. He guards like a jackrabbit who just scampered out from a vat filled with cold brew—never still, always alert, admirably straddling the line between chaos and control. His five deflections per 36 minutes leads this postseason (minimum 100 total minutes). “The way he flies around, his instincts take over,” Thunder guard Cason Wallace said. “He doesn’t overthink it. If he’s gonna gamble, he’s gonna gamble, right? He’s gonna go.”
The way he flies around, his instincts take over. He doesn’t overthink it. If he’s gonna gamble, he’s gonna gamble, right? He’s gonna go.Cason Wallace
The word that most often comes up when you talk to people who’ve been around Caruso is competitiveness. You immediately see it when he’s on the floor. He wants to get a stop on every possession, which isn’t something that can be said about everyone in the NBA. He’s passionate about it, cares deeply for the outcome of every play and then has enough sense to move on when his team allows a bucket—particularly if it’s scored on a well-executed game plan.
If there’s one downside to the way Caruso plays, it’s that he can’t do it for an entire game. When he was in Chicago, the coaching staff would have conversations about whether Caruso should be a permanent starter. Every data point suggested it was the right move, but Bulls head coach Billy Donovan often resisted, out of concern for the injury risk Caruso’s style posed, and how exhausted he’d be in the fourth quarter, when they needed him the most.
“I saw a Zach LaVine interview the other day where he called him like a crash dummy,” Pacers guard Haliburton said with a chuckle. “He’s willing to put his body in so many different places, do whatever it takes to win. He’s a great player. [After the] last couple years having to deal with him in Chicago [I’m] glad he was out of our division.”
Oklahoma City, with its stable of terrific wing defenders like Lu Dort, Jalen Williams, and Wallace, has the luxury of keeping Caruso fresh and not overexerting him as much as some other teams would. Caruso averaged his fewest minutes per game since 2020 this year, to everyone involved’s benefit.
“I play a pretty erratic style regardless if it’s Game 1 or if it’s Game 2 of the Finals,” Caruso said. “I just only have one gear. I don’t know how to play at 75 percent. Some of [the minutes reduction] was keeping me out of my own way, out of harm’s way. I don’t do a good job of that on my own. It was difficult just because I am such a competitive guy. If I’m only playing 15 to 20 minutes, if it’s one of those nights where it’s 15, we’re not playing great, like my instinct is to [say] all right, coach, leave me in there, let me fix it. Let me be the one to help us get out of it.”
Caruso’s mind constantly shuffles through different scenarios, likelihoods, and potential outcomes, and even when the end result doesn’t go Oklahoma City’s way, as was the case when Haliburton drilled a go-ahead jumper to win Game 1, Caruso’s mistakes can more accurately be described as calculated risks.
“I didn’t know if he was going to have enough time to throw a pass to Pascal, and I didn’t feel like it was a great deal of protection behind me at the time, at least enough for him to miss the shot. I just tried to peel off him and box him out,” he explained. “Over my basketball career, I’ve probably lost more games off second-chance shots at the buzzer than guys making game-winners. Just trying to do my best to keep him off the glass, but obviously the shot went in.”
If the Thunder win their first title since moving to Oklahoma City, there will be a long list of people and decisions to credit. It’s a team of contingency plans, backstops, and countless options. But the addition of Caruso, as a piece who supplied almost literally everything they didn’t have last season while still accentuating everything that already made them a no. 1 seed, is near the top of the list.
For the rest of these Finals, he’ll be the answer to whatever problems Indy is able to create. He can turn the water off against just about any scorer who’s pouring it on, while also mucking up their ball movement as a tireless help defender. If the Thunder find their backs against the wall, Daigneault will likely turn to Caruso, fatigue be damned. If ever there was a time to put him in the starting lineup, this is it.
He is an amplifier and an energizer, with elite reflexes, a willingness to help teammates, and an ability to dominate pretty much any one-on-one confrontation. He doesn’t need help and is able to offer it as well as anybody else. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is the Thunder’s most irreplaceable player, but Caruso’s impact, subtle and overt, has turned a great team into one that may be remembered for decades to come.
“That’s the reason I think they made the trade for me last summer, is they recognize the stuff that I was good at and the things that help elevate the players around me on the team,” Caruso said. “I’m allowed to just be myself, and that’s kind of where I thrive.”
