When the Oklahoma City Thunder beat the Indiana Pacers in Game 7 of the NBA Finals, it truly was a full-circle moment for Mark Daigneault and Alex Caruso. The head coach and the super-sub had been together on the lower rungs of the NBA ladder back in the 2016-17 season.
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Daigneault had coached the undrafted Caruso on the Oklahoma City Blue, the Thunder’s G League affiliate. From there, Caruso signed with the Lakers, helping them win the bubble title in 2020 as an integral glue guy. He then spent three years with the Chicago Bulls before being traded to OKC last offseason.
Caruso was reunited with Daigneault, who by that point had been coaching OKC’s big league team since 2020. OKC was the best team in the league the whole of last season. And though a good chunk of their success can be attributed to the presence of MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Caruso was an amplifying force, too.
Though OKC was also the 1-seed in the West in the 2023-24 season, they fizzled out in the postseason with a loss in the Western Conference semis. General manager Sam Presti traded for Caruso in the offseason, and the rest is history. The shooting guard’s defensive intensity was contagious, and it wouldn’t be unfair to say that they wouldn’t have won the title without him.
Caruso made a difference on the court, but as he revealed in a recent interview on Dubs Talk, NBC Sports Bay Area’s Warriors-focused show, he also served as the connective tissue between Daigneault’s more serious, “all basketball, all the time” approach and the rest of the roster’s more playful, goofy outlook.
“I’ve known [Daigneault] longer than anybody else and been able to be my true self around him at all times. I can be kind of a wiseass or sarcastic at times, and he’ll be going through film or speeches, and I’ll drop a little one-liner and break the tension and put everybody off, and he’ll get a chuckle and hit me back with something,” said Caruso.
“He does a great job of leading us and being serious when he needs to, and then we have our role of making sure that he’s not too serious,” he added.
Whatever the Thunder did, it certainly worked. They won 68 games in the regular season despite having the youngest roster in the league. They then went 16-7 in the playoffs, surviving two Game 7s along the way, to win the title. In the process, they defied conventional wisdom that a team so young couldn’t go all the way.
OKC struck the perfect balance between maintaining focus on the task at hand and having fun doing it.
While it’s difficult to say so given that they just completed one of the best seasons in NBA history, the Thunder could be even better next year. SGA, Jalen Williams, and Chet Holmgren have all been locked up to long-term extensions since the season ended, and Caruso will be back to tie it all together again.
