LeBron already in danger of losing more than NBA Finals to Curry
The official changing of the guard is three wins away.
By
Bill Reiter
•
3 min read
OAKLAND -- Round one of LeBron James versus Stephen Curry -- of dueling Most Valuable Players, of competing superstars, of two distinct versions of what and who rules the NBA -- took a turn Thursday night that does not bode well for LeBron and his deep need to show all of us who truly rules the league.
LeBron was dogged in his pursuit of Curry all night, regularly refusing to let anyone else switch on to the Warriors' star. No rivalry? Please. King James spoke volumes about how he views Curry the Usurper with how badly he wanted to dominate his rival.
And, theoretically, he largely succeeded. Curry scored just 11 points, shot only 4-of-15, scored just two points in the second and third quarters combined and, whenever LeBron regularly hounded him, was utterly ineffective.
Just one problem: The Warriors still won in smashing fashion. Their 104-89 win in Game 1 of the NBA Finals didn't just put the Cavaliers in an early hole on a night where Curry and Klay Thompson combined for just 20 points. It moved LeBron one step closer to seeing King James be more of a joke about Curry's overthrow of his kingdom than an accurate moniker.
Make no mistake -- masked in the more pressing matter of which team will be crowned the NBA's 2016 champion is a larger, legacy-defining battle: LeBron vs Steph.
All of us held in thrall by his magnificent talent have spent most of our time looking backwards to try and grasp how we will remember and judge him. It was Michael Jordan, and the Jordan era, we thought would prove the final measuring stick for LeBron's place in the game.
How could we have known to look a few years forward, to a player from Davidson many doubted would become a star at this level?
LeBron James cares deeply about his legacy. Not just being great, not just winning championships, not just doing amazing things as a basketball player -- he's accomplishment all of that and more. He's now onto longer-lasting greatness, that tricky ambition to compete not just with your contemporaries but with all who have come before you and all who will come later.
But legacies are fickle things, shaped by the things you can control and the things you can't.
The optics matter. To "Be like Mike" didn't hurt Jordan's ascension to his current status. The era you play in matters, too. The rise of sports programming and channels that exclusively covered it enhanced Jordan's aura, and the Internet and its social-media era can do the same for LeBron. But it can also tear you down. And you have to beat -- and most certainly not be beaten consistently by - your contemporaries.
If LeBron's reign atop the league has come to an early end because of Steph Curry, how can we talk about LeBron the way he wants us to years after he's retired?
Consider this legacy-defining resume if the Warriors do in fact beat Cleveland for another NBA championship: Curry, arguably the greatest shooter of all time, will have as many titles as LeBron, at two. He'll be halfway to LeBron's four Most Valuable Player awards, but Curry will have the only unanimous vote on his side. He'll have the 3-1 series comeback against the Thunder to protect him against that perhaps unfair "choker" label we like to throw at LeBron. He'll be 2-0 in the NBA Finals, both against LeBron. And he'll be just getting started, because another ring means this is a true dynasty he's forging with the Warriors.
And LeBron, apart from being 0-2 versus Curry in the Finals, will have an overall Finals record of 2-5.
It doesn't matter that LeBron had 23 points, 12 rebounds and 9 assists Thursday. It doesn't matter that his co-stars, Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love, combined to go 14 for 39. It doesn't matter that he was heroic in last year's injury-plagued Finals, nor that he should have won the Finals MVP that year despite losing the series. All that will matter is that he'll have lost, again, to Steph Curry.
Optics matter. They do. Curry beating LeBron twice for a championship will shape each of their places in the game. And LeBron stopping the 73-win Warriors from a championship -- and doing it for long-suffering Cleveland -- would have a similar, opposite hold and power over how we view them.
This is what's truly at stake in this year's NBA Finals, and why LeBron and his teammates' inability to capitalize on Curry's poor night is so important. Because LeBron, despite having a much better Game 1 than his rival, now finds himself three losses from losing so much more than a championship.
