The Oklahoma City Thunder’s acquisition of Alex Caruso in a rare one-for-one trade for point guard Josh Giddey was one of the most surprising moves of the offseason. It’s hard to say that it hasn’t worked out better than the Thunder ever could’ve dreamed of.
So far in these NBA Finals against the Indiana Pacers, it’s been a pretty simple story: if Caruso scores more than 20 points, his team wins. He did in Game 2 as Oklahoma City ran away with it, and he paired his 20 points in Game 4 with five steals as part of the Thunder’s late comeback.
Oklahoma City is a 9.5-point favorite for tonight’s pivotal Game 5 at DraftKings Sportsbook, with the point total set for 224.5. Below, I’ve detailed my favorite prop bets centered around the Bald Eagle.
Best Alex Caruso Prop Bets on DraftKings Sportsbook
Alex Caruso U1.5 Three-Pointers Made (-130)
Caruso has had a higher three-point attempt rate so far these playoffs than he did during the regular season, as some 57.9% of his attempts have come from deep, a slight uptick from the 54.6% mark that he posted in the regular season, when he made two or more triples in 20 of his 54 games. Still, while he managed 20 points in Game 4, most of his damage came inside the arc, as seven of his nine field-goal attempts came from two-point range. Overall, the Thunder’s reliance on the three-ball has dipped, as they’ve only taken 26 triples per game this series, down from 38.8 per contest in the regular season.
Plus, while his shooting ceiling is still high because the Pacers have largely ignored him — 36.4% of his shot attempts have been wide-open threes — his efficiency might be somewhat unsustainable. In the first four games of the series, he’s drained six of his 12 wide-open triples and two of his three with the nearest defender between four and six feet away after going just 60-for-168 (35.7%) on open or wide-open triples during the regular season. His usage has also ebbed from game to game; though an aggressive Caruso typically leads to team success, he’s liable for the occasional single-digit scoring performance.
Alex Caruso 1+ Blocks (-125)
Caruso has become enough of a ball hawk that his steals prop is no longer good value; two-plus steals at -165 odds, even if he’s done it in three of his four Finals games so far, is just steep enough for me to not feel comfortable taking it. Instead, I’m going to focus on the other, more underrated part of his defense, his ability to time up and impact shots. Indiana doesn’t allow a lot of rejections — just 17 so far these Finals, at a rate of 4.3 per game that would’ve been the league’s fifth-best mark during the regular season — but Caruso has had three of them.
So far this series, Caruso has guarded Pascal Siakam, Tyrese Haliburton, and Andrew Nembhard in mostly equal proportions, and while he hasn’t rejected Siakam or Haliburton yet, he has blocked Nembhard and Bennedict Mathurin. I’m not confident about him getting a swat on Siakam, given that the Cameroonian is six-foot-nine with a seven-foot-three wingspan and a high release, but Haliburton has a low release and Nembhard, like Caruso, is six-foot-five. He’s also certain to play at least 25 minutes, and in the 15 games combined between the regular season and playoffs that he’s hit that number, he’s recorded at least one block in seven of them.
