OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) \u2014 Alex Caruso sparked another big effort from the bench Tuesday night. And he’s a big reason the Thunder are on the verge of returning to the NBA Finals.<\/p>\n
Caruso scored 22 points and was 4 of 8 on 3-pointers to help Oklahoma City \u2014 down two starters \u2014 to a 127-114 victory over San Antonio in Game 5 of the Western Conference finals.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have good players on our bench. They\u2019ve got good players on their bench,\u201d Caruso said. \u201cSo, we know that\u2019s an area of the game where you can try to find some positive plus-minus time for that group.”<\/p>\n
The bench rotation wasn’t the same for the Thunder in Game 5; Jared McCain moved into the starting lineup and scored 20 points. McCain scored 24 of Oklahoma City’s 76 bench points in a 123-108 win in Game 3 at San Antonio.<\/p>\n
Instead, Oklahoma City got eight points off the bench from Kenrich Williams, who made both 3s he attempted, and seven points from Cason Wallace. The Thunder outscored the Spurs by 29 points in Wallace’s 31 minutes.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we\u2019ve just gone a good job, whoever it\u2019s been \u2014 and it\u2019s been a lot of different people during the series, a couple of guys that have been consistently there,\u201d said Caruso, who added six assists. That group, I think … has just done a great job of competing through those minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n
After five games, the Thunder bench is outscoring San Antonio’s reserves 257-127.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) \u2014 Alex Caruso sparked another big effort from the bench Tuesday night. And he’s a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":697441,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[96980,64,63,149503,68172,121680,590,5673,146002,145996,288646,269751,85,339997],"class_list":["post-697440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-alex-caruso","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cason-wallace","tag-jared-mccain","tag-kenrich-williams","tag-nba","tag-oklahoma-city","tag-package-100502-member-choice-sports-option","tag-product-30599-ap-sports-news-s-wire-only","tag-product-40807-ap-oklahoma-sports-only","tag-product-40815-ap-texas-sports-only","tag-sports","tag-thunder-spurs-nba-playoffs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=697440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697440\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/697441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=697440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=697440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=697440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}