LeBron v Steph has been the defining rivalry of my basketball life. Their latest chapter did not disappoint, but it’s clear their special rivalry is nearer to the end than the beginning
There are certain constants in our lives: north stars by which we can measure and trace the changes that occur around them as time passes us by. For the better part of the last decade, the steady fulcrum around which the NBA has revolved has been the special ongoing rivalry between future first-ballot Hall of Famers LeBron James and Stephen Curry.
Some basketball fans grew up at a time when they watched Magic Johnson and Larry Bird duke it out year after year, and other fandoms were formed during the swath of time in which extraordinary players, like Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, dominated the league and had no singular, definitive rival to speak of. Personally, basketball didn’t come into my life in a meaningful way until early adulthood, so for basically as long as I’ve been paying attention, an NBA centered around LeBron and Steph has represented the permanent blueprint. Any aspirant to the throne inevitably had to go through one or the other to reach the mountaintop, and for the four straight years Steph’s Warriors and LeBron’s Cavaliers met in the NBA finals (from 2015 to 2018), no one successfully did.
