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…
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