Lakers News: 2020 Champion LA Guard Hoping For Major End-Of-Year Hardware With New Team

A fan favorite among the 2020 champion Los Angeles Lakers' key role players, guard Alex Caruso, was allowed to walk as a free agent to the Chicago Bulls as part of the club's memorably terrible 2021 offseason.

That summer, champions Caruso, Kyle Kuzma and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope (plus then-recent Sixth Man of the Year Montrezl Harrell, who had disappointed during his lone LA season) departed the team, while the Lakers added the Corpse of Russell Westbrook, who was by that point in his Hall of Fame career worse than any three of those individual players, and retained combo guard Talen Horton-Tucker as a free agent over Caruso.

THT is languishing with the Utah Jazz now, while Caruso was just named to the NBA's 2023 All-Defensive First Team, having emerged as probably the Bulls' third-most important healthy player (another ex-player, Lonzo Ball, owned that distinction three knee surgeries ago) behind stars DeMar DeRozan and Zach LaVine (with apologies to the woefully overpaid Nikola Vucevic).

K.C. Johnson of NBC Sports Chicago reveals that Caruso isn't just satisfied with an All-Defensive Team honor, however. The 6'4" combo guard wants to be named the Defensive Player of the Year. His insanely physical style of play (and the fact that Chicago head coach Billy Donovan plays him out of position at power forward way too frequently) means that he generally gets hurt too much to play consistently enough to win that particular hardware. Caruso, however, blames another factor for his potential uphill battle for the award.

"The way DPOY is kind of voted on and based off of now is the interior has the upper hand on that just because of blocks and rebounds," Caruso said. "I probably don’t have enough of those to be under consideration. But you never know. I might have an incredible year."

That said, Caruso was happy with his first-ever All-Defensive Team honor.

"That was pretty cool," Caruso conceded. "It definitely was a goal. The first team is tough. You can’t luck into that. That’s a real accomplishment in this league, especially the way the game is played now where there’s so much emphasis on offense and space. I was pretty proud of that. And it was just cool because to get on one of those teams, you have to sacrifice a lot, mentally and physically. Show up every night and take on the challenge of guarding the best players in the league. And I thought it was pretty gratifying because the year before I felt like I was on the way to having consideration for one of those teams. And obviously, I missed half the season so that was out the window. So it was great."

He is missed at Crypto.com Arena.

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