College Station, Tex., known as the heart of Aggieland, is a small town that serves as the home of Texas A&M. Sports are king among its residents, many of whom are affiliated with the university. On basketball gamedays, 13,000 fans crowd into Reed Arena to watch their heroes play.
As giants roam the floor, nobody pays much attention to the scrawny middle-school ballboys, especially ones with braces, acne, and long, floppy bangs covering bushy eyebrows. Sure, they may sneak in some dribbling drills during shootarounds, but this is likely as close as they’ll get to playing for their beloved Aggies.
Unless you are Alex Caruso. His dream of playing at Reed Arena never died, and his basketball career never ended. He went from the SEC to the G-League to the NBA, and he enters these NBA Finals as a key player for the favored Oklahoma City Thunder. Should OKC knock off the Indiana Pacers, Caruso will earn his second NBA ring. Not bad for the local boy who just hoped to stay home to play college ball.
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Alex Caruso’s road to Texas A&M
Caruso’s father, Mike, was a good point guard for Creighton who rarely missed a free throw and won games for Hall of Fame coach Eddie Sutton based on an innate feel for the game rather than overwhelming physical attributes. At 5-foot-10, he figured his prospects as a pro were limited. He stayed close to sports though, putting in three decades as an administrator with the A&M athletics department.
His middle child, Alex, heard the Aggie fight song in place of lullabies as a baby. He spent his life in College Station, aspiring to be the next Acie Law.
Caruso was a good player as a kid. He was no J-Mychal Reese, though. Reese lived in the neighboring town of Bryan and was in the same recruiting class. J-Mych started showing up on national rankings in fourth grade, receiving a letter from Arizona coach Lute Olson that following summer. He was the No. 1 ranked 7th and 8th grader in the country. He starred in a commercial with Steve Nash, where Nash proclaimed “J-Mychal Reese? I named my dog after him.”
Colleges were all over Reese at the start of high school. They had no idea that Caruso existed. While Reese and other top-ranked prospects traveled the country to attend prestigious AAU events, Caruso stayed in College Station along with a few hundred local kids to play in Aggie summer basketball camps.
“The joke in-house was, ‘Oh, he’s a nice little camp player,'” A&M’s video coordinator at the time, Stephen Gentry, recalled. “He’d come back the next summer, and it would be like ‘Oh. He could play DII. Someone will take him.’ And then it was ‘Well gosh, no, he’s a DI player.’ And towards the end [of high school], almost like freaking out. ‘No. He’s good enough to play here.'”
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Mike Caruso would swing by Gentry’s office and ask if he could use the team’s DVD burner in order to send out tape of his son’s A&M Consolidated High School games to colleges. At first, Gentry happily obliged. By the time Alex was an upperclassman, it was a different story.
“At one point, I was just like ‘wait a second.’ Like, we don’t want you sending these out,” Gentry laughed.
A growth spurt late in high school helped put Caruso on the map. Suddenly, he was dunking on opponents, getting invites to national point guard camps, and garnering the interest of colleges. ESPN’s high school scouting report noted that he “might be the last guy you look at during warm ups, but his game will immediately grab your attention.”
Going through old college letters and came across this paper 😂😁👏🏻 @ACFresh21 #BabyCaruso pic.twitter.com/r4hsDebKwu
— Blair Schaefer (@Blair__Schaefer) May 25, 2016
Colorado almost stole the hometown kid from A&M. Mike Rohn was a former assistant for the Aggies who lived less than a block away from the Carusos in the same subdivision. When Alex was in middle school, Rohn used to beat him in one-on-one games at Castlegate Park down the street, on the maroon pavement with tight rims now named Caruso Court. Rohn remembers a skinny kid that wasn’t averaging 20 a game but did everything else on the floor.
“You can’t evaluate a guy’s toughness in his heart,” said Rohn, who was hired by Colorado before Caruso’s junior year of high school. “Those are things he’s made a career out of.”
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Rohn noticed the things in Caruso’s game that only stood out after watching him for years every day. Diving on the floor. Guarding the best player every night. The fiery competitiveness and trash talk. He told Colorado head coach Tad Boyle that Colorado had to have him. They invited Caruso out to campus, offered him a scholarship, and tripped off alarm bells within the A&M staff.
At that time, the A&M staff was divided. Half of the coaches thought that there was no way two high-level prospects could really be right there in College Station. Reese was a can’t-miss prospect who they secured a commitment from. But the ballboy, Mike Caruso’s son?
Bill Walker was an assistant coach for A&M whose son Vince played with Caruso in high school. Some of the players that Walker scouted for the Aggies looked 20 when they were 15. He remembers Caruso as “a late bloomer who looked like a kid when he was a kid.”
Walker knew though that Caruso’s leadership was beyond his age. Caruso would drive younger players to team dinners and get on them when they took shortcuts in practice drills. He joined a bad 5A high school team and got them to a 31-5 record by his senior year.
Walker was part of the other half of the staff that was anxious to get Caruso. That side eventually won out. Colorado couldn’t compete with the Aggie maroon and white running through his veins.
Alex Caruso goes from the SEC to the G-League
Even after getting a scholarship, his older A&M teammates didn’t know if he was there simply because he was the local kid with ties to the program. They saw a goofy kid who always had a smile on his face and loved belting out Country music and Taylor Swift lyrics. They wondered if he could actually play.
It didn’t take long to change that impression. Reese had seen how good Caruso was during their middle and high school battles. He knew that Caruso would bring the same things in college. He estimates that it took less than a week for everyone else to figure that out too.
“He was putting his body on the line, diving into the stands. When I see him do it today, to me, that’s Caruso,” Reese told Sporting News.
Me and @ACFresh21 #aggienation pic.twitter.com/OYe8NK75
— J-Mych Reese (@j_mych2x) November 11, 2011
Caruso cracked the starting lineup in the seventh game of the season. By the end of the year, he’d broken the freshman SEC record for steals.
He had a good college career, helping lead one of the most memorable comebacks in the school’s history as a senior — a second-round double overtime win in the 2016 NCAA Tournament against Northern Iowa in which the Aggies trailed by 12 with only 44 seconds to go.
Despite that high-profile win, it was the same story for him after graduation. He averaged just 8.1 points per game in his final year of college. Sure, he was a great defender. But he didn’t look like an NBA player.
It wasn’t a huge shock when he went undrafted. He did get a summer league invite, playing unremarkably while fighting for minutes behind Ben Simmons and T.J. McConnell on the Sixers. His NBA dreams were on life support. He weighed playing in Poland or Germany. Then the Thunder came calling, offering him a training camp invite.
Caruso said yes immediately. He was cut from the team’s opening day roster, but got a contract with the G-League franchise led by a 31-year-old rising coach named Mark Daigneault.
Nearly a decade later, this duo went from OKC’s G League to heading into the Western Conference Finals together 🔥🏀 #TeamWass
(via: @ThunderFilmRoom) pic.twitter.com/pI2brxcKRV
— Wasserman Basketball (@wassbasketball) May 20, 2025
Caruso didn’t get a single NBA call-up during that first year in the G-League. He was ninth on the roster in points per game. His contributions on the defensive end were going largely unnoticed. He was the overlooked high school kid who had to prove himself all over again.
Thunder General Manager Sam Presti traveled with the OKC Blue on one of their road trips during Caruso’s rookie year. It was there that he learned what he would have to do in order to make it in the NBA.
Someone asked Presti how he decided to call-up players from the G-League. He told them that he looked for two things: How many positions they could guard, and if they could be a good teammate.
At that time, Caruso felt that he could guard two positions capably at the NBA level. He knew he was already a team-first guy. He committed to getting stronger.
Caruso earns his spot in the NBA
It took another summer league showing, this one with the Lakers, before Caruso got inked to his first two-way contract and spot NBA minutes. Los Angeles signed him to another two-way the next year. In his third season with the team, he finally earned a guaranteed deal, a starting spot in an NBA Finals game, and a championship ring while playing alongside LeBron James.
Despite that success, Caruso still had his doubters within the organization. The Lakers let him walk in free agency a year after winning their title, choosing to prioritize Talen Horton-Tucker instead of him.
Caruso signed a modest four-year contract with the Bulls that made him the 146th-highest paid player in the league. Presti watched him continue to improve over the next several seasons.
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Last summer, Presti had seen enough. He made the move to reacquire the player that he had once cut, trading former No. 6 pick Josh Giddey to Chicago in order to get him. As Presti spoke to the media for the first time about the trade, he harkened back to those original scouting beliefs.
“His effectiveness on bigger wing players is extraordinary,” Presti said.
Presti knew that Caruso could now guard up in position. But he still had no idea how far the ballboy from College Station had come.
With the Thunder’s season on the line in Game 7 of the second round, Daigneault called on the 6-foot-5, 186-pound Caruso to match up against all 6-foot-11 and 284 pounds of Nikola Jokic. Caruso, who at the start of his NBA journey didn’t believe that he could guard small forwards, fought Jokic for every inch of space on the floor. He held the three-time MVP center to a pedestrian 20 points and five turnovers. The Thunder won the game by 32, advancing to the Conference Finals where they dispatched the Timberwolves in five games to make the franchise’s second ever NBA Finals appearance.
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Gentry saw that Game 7 performance and was thinking of Caruso’s incredible determination a few days later. His 11-year-old daughter was distraught after failing to make one of the top traveling soccer teams in the state. He told her Caruso’s story from start to finish. The ballboy who was a late bloomer. Running your own race. Being overlooked, continuing to work, and reaching the pinnacle of your sport.
As his daughter listened, Gentry pulled up a picture of Caruso. She squinted at the bald head. The headband. She paused, thinking what so many coaches, teammates, and executives had before.
“Dad,” she said, looking at the picture intently. “He doesn’t play in the NBA.”