OKC Stole Alex Caruso and I'm Not Surprised
Per Adrian Wojnarowski: The Chicago Bulls are trading two-time All-Defensive guard Alex Caruso to the Oklahoma City Thunder for guard Josh Giddey, sources tell ESPN.
If you saw Woj’s tweet without much prior basketball knowledge and decided to look up the stats of Giddey and Caruso, you might’ve thought the Bulls fleeced the Thunder. After all, Giddey was the 6th pick in the draft back in 2021 and averaged 17/8/6 and one point in his young career and Caruso just reached age 30 and his career average is just 6.8 points per game.
If you are anything above a casual, you, like me, would understand that OKC got the much better end of the bargain, and that it’s not much of a surprise at all given their past history of deals like this one.
Caruso was going to be one of the most sought after players in the NBA going into this offseason and is widely regarded to be the perfect fit for any contender. It’s no secret that the Lakers won the championship in 2020 and then went a combined 75-79 in their next two seasons after Caruso left.
Caruso will fit like a glove into this OKC starting five of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Lu Dort, himself, Jalen Williams, and Chet Holmgren. He’s the missing piece on defense for a team that now boasts four All-Defensive Team caliber players with Caruso, Dort, Williams, and Holmgren, and SGA who is a very high quality defender. The Thunder’s newest acquisition has averaged at least 1.5 steals in his last three seasons on a Bulls team that has shown little interest in defense, and he can guard 1-3 and something the 4 with with capability. FiveThirtyEight’s meticulously crafted RAPTOR stat combines essentially all box score stats, player tracking data, and plus-minus data to spit out a number that tells how good a player is. The final number shows offensive RAPTOR plus defensive RAPTOR. Caruso, last season, posted the highest defensive RAPTOR of any player with 6.1, and he ranked 9th overall in the NBA in total RAPTOR (the other 22 of the top 23 players have all been All-Stars at one point in their career). As for Giddey, don’t let his rebounding numbers fool you. He’s a subpar defender anywhere he goes.
Caruso might not have Giddey’s elite vision and playmaking but the Thunder don’t necessarily need it. SGA is one of the best ball-handlers in the league and a very capable playmaker himself, averaging 1.4 more assists than Giddey last season. However, Caruso does everything on offense that Giddey doesn’t do. Though he isn’t always quick to pull the trigger from three, he shot 40.8% from distance last season which ranks in the top-20th percentile in the league. OKC thrives on having great spacing and led the league in three-point percentage last season. He is a great passer himself, averaging 3.5 assists, and is a great off-ball player on offense unlike Giddey.
Caruso’s best player comparison to me is a slightly worse offensive version of Derrick White, and as many of my readers know, White can be the key to a championship team just as much as any star player can. Giddey can make a difference in Chicago, but considering the level that his offensive limitations hindered Oklahoma City in the playoffs, it almost feels like OKC got Caruso for nothing.
Somehow, despite holding 34 draft picks in the next seven years, acclaimed Thunder general manager, Sam Presti, managed to hold onto every single one of them while getting the better player in his trade for Caruso. Presti, a product of my alma mater, Concord-Carlisle High School, has ascended to being one of the best general managers in the NBA because of trades like this one.
He started his career with a bang by drafting Kevin Durant second overall in the 2007 draft. A year later, Presti hit on Russell Westbrook with the 4th pick in the 2008 draft and Serge Ibaka with the 24th pick. To complete the trifecta of draft picks, he selected James Harden with the third pick in the 2009 draft. By 2012, Presti had flipped a 20-62 team into an NBA Finals team in four seasons. However, there was still work to be done.
Presti has never been afraid of trading away top players unlike the other team involved in the Giddey-Caruso trade. On October 27th of 2012, he traded James Harden for several first round picks—one of which became future starting center, Steven Adams. Though the move was a bit confusing at the time, Presti knew it would offer the keys to the franchise to Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook and create a more prototypical build for a great team—two superstars and a boatload of depth.
Kevin Durant leaving for Golden State in 2016 was a blow to Presti and the Thunder that nobody could have envisioned was possible. However, he kept pushing, acquiring a young Victor Oladipo and Domantas Sabonis who would both become valuable trade assets.
A year later, Presti re-jacked the roster with Paul George and Carmelo Anthony alongside Westbrook. Though they were a first round exit in Anthony’s only year with the team and only won one playoff game in the next, Paul George was still an MVP candidate. Most front offices would have chased relevancy and kept George and Westbrook who had turned into the best player in franchise history, but Presti chose to trade George while his market value was high. These are the details.
Clippers receive:
Paul George
Thunder receive:
G Shai Gilgeous-Alexander
F Danilo Gallinari
Miami Heat’s 2021 unprotected first-rounder (Tre Mann taken at No. 18)
Clippers’ 2022 unprotected first-rounder (Jalen Williams taken at No. 12)
Right to 2023 first-round swap with Clippers (not conveyed)
Clippers’ 2024 unprotected first-rounder
Heat’s 2025 protected first-rounder for 1-14 (unprotected for 2026)
Right to 2025 first-round swap with Clippers
Clippers’ 2026 unprotected first-rounder
Though there are still more draft picks to come, headlined by an enticing looking 2026 unprotected first-rounder from the Clippers, the Thunder have already found their two franchise cornerstones in Gilgeous-Alexander and Williams by means of the trade. Now, it’s safe to say that Presti fleeced the Clippers.
The George trade wasn’t the only groundbreaking deal that OKC exercised that summer. Six days later, they traded Westbrook.
Rockets receive:
Russell Westbrook
Thunder receive:
Chris Paul
2024 first-round pick, protected 1-4
2026 first-round pick, protected 1-4
2025 swap, 1-20 protected
2021 swap with Clippers or Heat, protected 1-4
Against all odds, the Thunder finished with a better record than the year prior and were one possession away from defeating Westbrook and Harden’s Rockets in the first round of the playoffs. Presti took a distressed asset in Paul and was able to get every drop of value out of him in OKC in order to trade him for a slew of role players and a first round pick from Phoenix. In just two years, he had taken a team with no future ahead of them and created perhaps the most abundant collection of young assets and draft picks in recent NBA history. Those players and draft picks would assemble the team with the best record in the Western Conference last year, and now Caruso appears to be one of two missing pieces (I still believe they need more center depth).
If there is a front office that completely contradicts what Presti has done in Oklahoma City, it’s the Bulls front office led by GM, Marc Eversley. This season, the Bulls became the first team in NBA history to make zero trade deadline transactions for three years in a row. Unlike Presti, who sacrificed multiple years of relevancy for the rebuild at the start of the 2020s, Eversley has died on the hill of mediocrity being the solution over a rebuild. As long as he has a few big-ish names, fans that come to games, and the best sports team among a miserable list of Chicago teams (the Bears, White Sox, Cubs, and Blackhawks are all last place in their respective divisions or conferences), Eversley appears to be happy.
I mentioned that Presti was unafraid to trade away Harden, George, and Westbrook when they were either improving or at their peaks. The exact opposite can be said of Eversley and the Bulls. They had a chance to trade DeMar DeRozan two seasons ago after he surprisingly earned All-NBA second team honors. Now, he’s two years older, worse in virtually every category, and for what? A couple of Play-In seasons? The Bulls aren’t smart. They should have traded Zach LaVine but seemed to believe that he still had superstar potential, so they didn’t. LaVine is on a terrible contract, isn’t shooting as well as years past, is a bad defender, and therefore will not garner much of a trade package.
The Bulls might have had a Westbrook-George-Anthony situation on their hands with DeRozan, Lavine, and Nikola Vucevic, but instead of trading them at their peaks like Presti did when they had no chance of winning either way, the Bulls chose to be average and will now be faced with the consequences when the see the underwhelming deals that are offered for DeRozan and LaVine this offseason.
Chicago has one of two options. Go out with their current roster and fight to win 34 games, or tank. Neither of those scenarios are good enough for Eversley, who has watched his team lose more games for each of the last three seasons, but it’s the reality he’s facing after making all the wrong decisions since 2021.
Caruso was the least of the Bulls problems in 2024, and yet he was the player Eversley prioritized trading in what has potential to be a complete roster teardown. With the trade, the Bulls have created even more problems for themselves including what they will do with Coby White and Lonzo Ball, and the issue of Giddey’s poor off-court reputation for fans that already hate their front office more than any team.
I believe that the Bulls were just fleeced by Presti and the Thunder, but after all of their wrongdoings in the last three years, they deserved this.