When a particular brand of greatness persists for more than two decades, as LeBron James’s career has, certain real-time moments can feel like inadvertent communes with the past. Watching James freely and calmly dismantle the New Orleans Pelicans on Sunday in the final game of the 2023-24 regular season, I found myself thinking about 2015 and the luxuries LeBron possesses today, at 39, that he couldn’t access then at the ripe old age of 30. In other words, I was beside myself after witnessing LeBron’s latest feat of time-bending.
Nine years ago, against the Warriors in the 2015 Finals, LeBron largely stood alone: Kevin Love had dislocated his shoulder in the first round; Kyrie Irving fractured his kneecap in Game 1 against Golden State. In the face of a paradigm-shifting, generation-defining attack from the Warriors, James engaged in what would be dubbed caveman ball—a brutish, survivalist mode of play that prioritized quantity over quality for the first time in LeBron’s career. He attempted a staggering 196 field goals in six games, by far the most attempts he’s had in any of the 53 playoff series in which he’s played since his first in 2006. “I don’t enjoy being as non‑efficient as I was. I don’t enjoy that,” James said after losing the Finals in Game 6. “I don’t enjoy dribbling the ball for countless seconds on the shot clock and the team looking at me to make a play.” LeBron’s last-gasp Cavs logged a total of 14 assists in that elimination loss—LeBron had 13 in the first half against the Pelicans on Sunday. Overhead passes to cutters, shovel passes to open shooters, skyscraping lobs to Anthony Davis. It was the most assists LeBron had ever recorded in any half of play. Even in Game no. 82 of year 21, something new.
It was how I imagine James would want to play every game if he could: making simple, instinctive reads he can (and probably does) make in his sleep, rewarding his teammates for being in the right place at the right time, executing when called on, and bulldozing opponents upon receiving the ball downhill. For a guy who hadn’t yet secured a spot in the playoffs, he played with the kind of tranquility one feels when fully settled into a routine. He’s been here before—this will be his third play-in tournament in the five seasons it’s been a part of the game. He was a pioneer as recently as this season, when he was crowned the inaugural NBA Cup MVP. There is nothing in this league LeBron hasn’t seen. If there is, then he can rest assured knowing no one else in the league has seen it either.
Sunday’s win puts the Lakers in the catbird seat in the tournament: Should they embarrass the Pelicans for a third time on national television this season, they will lock in a playoff spot against the reigning champion Denver Nuggets. Lose, and they’ll get another shot on Friday night against either the Warriors or Sacramento Kings, with a chance to face the Oklahoma City Thunder on the line. In the moments after the game, with images of LeBron’s first of many postseason duels against the Warriors conjured, my mind drifted to a certain scenario: With Denver as the no. 2 seed, might the Lakers throw their initial no. 7 vs. no. 8 play-in game against New Orleans to avoid the most unenviable playoff matchup in the NBA? Would it be right to cheat the game in such a way? Or would it be cheating the game not to set up a possible win-or-go-home matchup between LeBron and Steph Curry—the godheads of this era of basketball—just one more time?
There is a failure in language when it comes to describing the cosmic synchronicity of LeBron James and Steph Curry. The two are bound together in ways few players in league history have ever been—from where they both entered this world (in the same maternity ward on the same floor in Akron) to where they stand today as standard-bearers of sustained excellence. Their stark difference in physical stature suggests a certain Messi-Ronaldo dynamic, yet it’s not the consensus to consider the two players rivals at all. That’s interesting, isn’t it?
The greatest sports rivalries traffic in contrasts, in occupying the negative space of the other player while occupying the same space in high-stakes competition at the summit. Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain famously played against each other in eight playoff series; Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, who had the greatest basketball rivalry of all time, faced off four times between the 1979 NCAA championship game and their three NBA Finals series. LeBron and Steph’s history can be nestled right in between. Counting the play-in tournament, James and Curry have had six postseason matchups, with a potential seventh in the near future. Each player has four rings to his name—tied for the most among active players. There have been only two Finals series in the past 13 seasons that didn’t involve either LeBron or Steph. Judging by sheer numbers, it is the biggest rivalry in modern NBA history. But there is a certain orthodox bias when it comes to constructing rivalries in our collective mind’s eye. It’s a matter of optics and positionality: LeBron and Steph don’t battle against each other directly, so what exactly are we comparing?
Zoomed in, it’s always felt safer to cover one’s bases and present LeBron’s biggest rival as the collective Warriors—a reflection of just how much ground James covers as a foil (or at least a constant presence) for Curry, Kevin Durant, and the revolution the team as a whole ushered in. James and Golden State are forever bonded by the triumph and trauma of the 2016 Finals: LeBron’s greatest victory came at the expense of what could have been considered the greatest season in NBA history had the Warriors not given up their 3-1 series lead. Zoomed out, aside from chasing titles, the ways that each player has exerted their influence on the past, present, and future of basketball don’t really stand in opposition to each other. In their own way, they both exist outside the NBA’s historical framework.
Steph is the greatest point guard in the history of basketball who isn’t always considered a point guard to begin with. The archetype—exemplified by Chris Paul, who is somehow both the Point God and the Salieri to Steph’s Mozart—invokes vaguely militaristic connotations: Point guards are floor generals who dictate play with the ball in their hands. Curry, meanwhile, communicates placement and sets his teammates up more like a worker bee does with a waggle dance. “Make it work no matter what you have to work with,” Curry has said. “That’s something that stuck with me very early on as a point guard. Adjust. Get creative. Try a different angle, a different lane, a different move, or a different shot—just make it work.”
Without the ball, Steph moves like he’s in a synesthetic phantasm, with the colors of the wind leading him to where he and his teammates need to be. In some sense, they are: For years, he’s worked on speeding up his pattern recognition and reactivity with colored light sensors triggered by touch and motion—each color signifies a different course of action to take. For years, he’s immersed himself in neurological drills and perceptual overloads (the most famous of which involves bouncing tennis balls off the wall with one hand while maintaining a basketball dribble with the other—something Luka Doncic, rated The Ringer’s no. 2 player in the NBA, cannot do at all.) All in an effort to narrow the gap between body and mind. To potentiate every single micro-grain of time in any given moment. Faster releases from farther away. The first long-form story published on this site—written by yours truly—examined the long-term impact of Steph as the phenomenon happened. “The NBA had to learn how to prevent shots that, before, never had to be guarded in the first place,” I wrote in 2016. Eight years is long enough to see just how much that has warped the next generation’s approach to the game. Curry’s unprecedented gifts shifted basketball’s relationship to space and time—this era of NBA history belongs to him.
That is no affront to LeBron, who inhabits a different plane. “My game is really played above time,” James famously said, shortly after his 20th birthday. He meant it as a way of explaining his anticipatory sixth sense when it comes to passing players open—something he did a ton on Sunday. But it also incisively conveys LeBron’s place in the annals of NBA lore at this juncture of his career. He makes history because he is history.
LeBron’s career was born out of the cosmic dust left over from Michael Jordan’s final farewell in 2003. Jordan, in all his athletic and psychological dominance, reshaped the way players and spectators alike conceive of legacy. Jordan controlled the basketball imagination through a cult of personality; Kobe Bryant, Jordan’s heir apparent, entered the slipstream in Jordan’s leave and occupied that void with the emulative verve of an apprentice and the heady remove of a scholar. The cult of personality became a sphere of influence. Kobe’s devotion to the work became a universal language—James, despite or maybe even because of his greatness, was never quite able to capture the same sense of public devotion. Jordan, with a brilliant smile, invited us to be like him; Kobe turned labor into a virtue; Steph opened the door for scrawny folks to dream much, much bigger. What’s the point in aspiring to be the perfect basketball phenom blessed with every physical advantage in the book and a supercomputer for a brain? Or perhaps that emotional distance between LeBron and NBA fans was the result of the lingering specters of a different rivalry: one that was promised but never delivered. (Remember the MVPuppets?) Kobe’s primacy remained intact through some of LeBron’s most dominant seasons because we never had the chance to see it checked at the highest level.
But all things must pass, right? The beginning of the end of Kobe’s career occurred on April 12, 2013, in the moments just after he attempted to pull his ruptured Achilles tendon back into place and drilled two free throws—the Lakers’ margin of victory in a game against Golden State wherein Curry scored 47 points. Curry’s sphere of influence was just beginning to emerge, and it blossomed into the NBA’s new epoch writ large almost exactly three years later: Kobe’s final game ran concurrently with the match where Curry’s Warriors set a new regular-season wins record. Is it a bit woo-woo to see a sort of celestial arrangement in all of this? Of course it is. But the enormity of these moments, of these stars, creates a sense of fate. Fans shout Curry’s name at half court the way they shout Kobe’s while turning around on a fadeaway. Jordan, Kobe, Steph—their spheres of influence trace an outline of the past four decades of basketball. They may as well be planets. To scout, to inhabit, to subsume. And LeBron is a veritable Silver Surfer. It wasn’t in the cards for James to necessarily join that planetary system, nor would that have been the most interesting outcome. Instead, LeBron is all the space between—the connective tissue across eras. I’m sure you’ve heard: LeBron, at 39, shot a better percentage from 3 (41 percent) than Curry did this season (40.8 percent). Just the latest and greatest anomaly of James’s timeless career: a shining example of the lengths to which LeBron has gone to adapt and conquer.
“You have to reflect on everything that we’ve all gone through since the ’15 Finals and just appreciate the opportunity to have another chapter in that battle and that competition,” Curry said of LeBron and the Warriors after Game 1 of their semifinal clash last year. All of this to say: We missed out on Kobe-LeBron, and we’ll never have the opportunity to see that again—but we can get another glimpse of this era’s two defining stars in opposition once more on Friday, if the fates allow. Of course, we don’t live in a just world, and wish fulfillment is an idea that works only in hindsight.
Did you watch WrestleMania XL last week, by chance? Remarkable show. Spellbinding drama. A master class in kindling nostalgia. A cultural moment powered almost exclusively by the warmth of memories past. Over the past few years, I’ve found myself gravitating back toward professional wrestling as a sort of holistic complement to live sports. I find myself drawn to the art form as an operatic show of athleticism that is, for the most part, unencumbered by time. Fans respond to the bodies in motion, of course, but more so the avatars they project—avatars whose primacy wears away at a much slower pace than that of their human vessels. The Undertaker, one of the most iconic figures in WWE history—59, ostensibly retired—can still summon a moment of pure awe for the world to see, something not afforded to most elite athletes in decline. Roger Federer was asked by GQ last month whether he still had it. “It doesn’t go away,” Federer said. “It’s like riding a bike.” But the only witness to Fed’s rocketing forehands was a kid getting a few on-court pointers from the GOAT—such shots can no longer carry the weight of symbolism. They burn bright and dissipate just as soon.
It’s almost been a decade since Steph and LeBron’s first Finals meeting. Roughly twice the length of the average NBA player’s career. It’s a miracle what they’re still capable of. Maybe I find myself clinging to the potential of one more high-stakes bout between Steph and LeBron because, although both players are still operating at top-10 levels, it’s not clear what the future holds or how much time is left. LeBron will likely opt out of his contract at the end of the season … and then what? Another potential retirement news cycle? Making good on the long-held dream of playing on the same team as his son? A late-career sojourn in the Bay, à la Durant—just to experience the majesty of Steph’s off-ball movement for himself? (Wilder things have happened.)
Because it’s the immediate future that is unknowable, we have a better sense of things further down the line. Curry has two years remaining on his contract, but CBS News is already asking him whether he’s down to run for president. LeBron’s made it all too known that, come hell or high water, he’ll be the owner of the NBA’s future franchise in Las Vegas. These are future considerations that are at odds with the ironclad careers they’ve built in the league, the kinds of ambitions that invite a level of scrutiny that can’t be swept away with numbers on the board. These are spinoffs that divert nostalgia into a foreign context and render it inapplicable. Reminders that the end is approaching at an uncomfortable velocity. Depending on your vantage point, commissioner Adam Silver is at either the beginning or the end of the five stages of grief. “For those that have been around the sport long enough, I remember when Magic retired and Larry retired and Michael retired and Kobe retired,” Silver told reporters last week. “It’s just that new and different stars end up emerging, have their own personalities, their own styles, and [the] next generation of fans cares as much about them as they did the players before them.” Of course, there’s being optimistic, and there’s the reality: A next-man-up mentality doesn’t exactly work for stars of LeBron’s and Steph’s magnitude.
All the more reason to home in on the now. Both of their seasons could end this week. Both could also go on playoff runs. Everything is in play, and, in this moment, everything is possible. Curry averaged nearly three more points per game this season than in that 2014-15 championship season despite playing the same 32.7 minutes per game. LeBron hasn’t been this efficient scoring the ball in 10 years. Their model-breaking consistency over the past two decades is the closest the NBA can get to replicating the allure of a timeless avatar. Whether their respective futures involve one more meeting in the postseason or not, through Steph and LeBron, we can witness nostalgia move in real time.
