Alex Caruso Refuses to Credit Spurs After Thunder Game 7 Loss: ‘There’s Nothing That Needs to Be Solved’
Alex Caruso is not in the mood to praise the team that just ended his season.
Hours after the San Antonio Spurs eliminated the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder 111-103 in Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals, a reporter asked Caruso whether the Spurs presented a matchup problem the Thunder needed to solve going forward. The answer was as salty as anything you will hear out of an NBA postgame podium this spring.
“There’s nothing that needs to be solved,” Caruso said, per Joel Lorenzi of The Athletic. “We could’ve won the game tonight. You would’ve been asking them the same thing. I don’t think there’s this narrative that this is a bugaboo. We should’ve played better and won the game and been in the NBA Finals.”
Caruso did toss in a quick acknowledgment that the Spurs are a good young team that will be around for a while. But the message was clear. He is not buying that San Antonio is built specifically to beat OKC, and he refuses to walk out of that locker room treating the Spurs like the bigger brother.
Here is the problem with that take. The numbers are not on his side.
San Antonio beat the Thunder four times in five regular-season meetings, including in the NBA Cup. The Spurs then knocked out OKC on the road in Game 7 despite the Thunder owning home court advantage throughout the playoffs. Across the entire 2026 postseason, the Thunder went 12-2 against every other Western Conference opponent. Against San Antonio they went 3-4 and now they are watching the Finals from home.
That is not noise. That is a pattern. And patterns do not vanish just because Alex Caruso would prefer they did.
To Caruso’s credit, he was one of the few Thunder players who actually showed up in the series. He averaged 14.9 points per game across the seven contests on a sparkling 48/50/82 shooting split off the bench. He defended at his usual elite level. He had multiple heated moments with Spurs players, including the late-half dustup with Stephon Castle that Dylan Harper had to defuse. Nobody in the OKC locker room can question his effort.
The frustration is understandable. Caruso is 32 and just lost a winnable series to a team that is younger, deeper and only getting better. His title window is not as wide as Holmgren’s or Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s. Watching the Spurs walk into the Finals had to sting.
But denying the matchup problem does not make it go away. The Thunder need to figure out how to handle Wembanyama in space. They need to figure out who guards Stephon Castle when De’Aaron Fox runs pick and roll. They need to figure out whether Holmgren is the answer at the five against San Antonio or whether they have to get bigger. Those are real basketball questions and they require real basketball answers, not press conference deflections.
OKC has been here before. The team responded to past playoff disappointments with sharper rosters and tighter rotations. Sam Presti will not panic. But Caruso’s “nothing to solve” line will age poorly if the Spurs and Thunder meet again next spring and the result looks the same.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
