PARIS – Steph Curry throwing alley-oop lobs to LeBron James, and James returning the favor, delivering a pass to Curry for a 3-pointer.
Curry in a USA Basketball team meeting announcing James as the male flag bearer for the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Curry and James celebrating each other and relishing this opportunity as teammates on the U.S. men’s 5x5 Olympic basketball team.
Those moments and the burgeoning friendship would not have been possible eight years ago.
Not when James and Curry were locked into fierce competitions in the NBA Finals, seeking MVPs and jockeying for the “best player on the planet” title – all at the other’s expense.
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They wanted the same things, and they both could not have them, not simultaneously. Now, they can achieve the same goal – an Olympic gold medal. The U.S. plays Serbia Thursday at 3 p.m. ET in a semifinal game, and the winner will play the winner of France-Germany for gold.
For four consecutive seasons – 2015 to 2018 – it was Cleveland vs. Golden State, but it was also LeBron vs. Steph.
It was a rivalry that did not scream friendship, and the tension was apparent. Curry called it a “healthy resentment of somebody who’s standing in your way.”
It was similar to the Sylvester Stallone-Arnold Schwarzenegger rivalry of the 1980s, when they each wanted to be the top box office action hero and there was a feud. Curry and James were the NBA’s box office stars. They both wanted top billing.
Just like Stallone and Schwarzenegger finally appeared in movies together, and the tension dissipated.
“The game of basketball doesn’t last forever, and you don't want to waste the opportunity to be able to have a relationship with someone,” James said, explaining where he and Curry are today.
The river of time smoothes the sharp rocks.
“I feel like they’ve always been friends,” said Kevin Durant, who is friends with both players. “When you compete against each other in a series, of course you’re not going to be that buddy-buddy. … I think they’ve become better friends once they went through that experience of competing with one another and being rivals, as you would call it.”
And James even seemed to indicate the competitiveness of those Finals matchups hid a behind-the-scenes relationship.
“LeBron versus Steph, they should never smile against each other on the court. They should hate each other. We get it,” James said. “We understand that a lot of y'all maybe grew up in a (Larry) Bird-Magic (Johnson) era and they shouldn't like each other, but I'm also old enough to know that Isiah (Thomas) and Magic hugged each and kissed each other on the floor too because it was just mutual respect. You know what I'm saying?
“I'm also old enough to know that they say Michael (Jordan) never talked to any of his opponents, but I'm also smart enough to know that him and Charles (Barkley) had a lot of conversations during the ’93 Finals and also played golf once against each other.”
So maybe it wasn’t as heated. But still. At a James Halloween party in 2016, after the Cavaliers had come back from a 3-1 deficit to beat Golden State in the Finals, James had a drum kit with “3-1 Lead” on it and had cookies shaped like tombstones with Curry and Klay Thompson’s names on them. Then, at Harrison Barnes’ wedding the following year, it appeared Curry mocked a James workout video, though Curry said he wasn’t.
“Through it all, there's obviously the utmost respect for who he is as a person and a player, and how good he is and the challenge of trying to beat him and trying to solve that problem every year,” Curry said.
Curry acknowledged the edge began to soften when James left Cleveland for the Los Angeles Lakers in 2018. “The dynamic changed,” Curry said. “Even when we played in the play-in game in 2021, you could feel it, but it wasn’t the same. … Even the next year, our team was different, and the build-up wasn’t the same.”
You could start to sense a change – at least publicly – in the relationship when the NBA started using captains to select All-Star rosters, and James and Curry were the captains. They had fun together picking teams on the TNT broadcast, and then in 2021, they played on the same All-Star team.
“I was just trying to find Steph, like the whole first quarter, dribble handoffs to him, letting him step back, hit shots, whatever the case may be,” James said.
It was the first indication that playing together on the 2024 Olympic team might be a thing, and last summer, James and Curry discussed the idea in a phone call.
“I get to see a little different side of him and the work that he puts in and how he approaches practice, the way he talks and communicates,” Curry said. “I get to see that side of it, which is really, really dope. He gets to see that from me as well.
“But we're all trying to put it together where I see how our games complement each other and I think there's an appreciation at the highest level for what this six week experience is going to be and how our relationship can kind of evolve and deepen from that.”
Said James: “I know how much he loves to win and how much he loves to be in competition, so that's going to be cool. But just being around him off the floor, we've always had these short moments — either an All-Star Game where we had these short pockets of time together, and it's been super organic and easy. So looking forward to that.”
James and Curry have started every game in the exhibition schedule, and they often run a play together where Curry sets a screen for James , making the defense choose: give Curry an open 3-point shot or let James drive to the basket against a smaller defender.
“We do it a little bit in Golden State, where you have somebody else having the ball and me setting it, and I have a lot of different actions you can run," Curry said. "But if you get (LeBron) going downhill, good luck to anybody trying to stop him and having me come off into space.
“Just try to make teams make decisions. And the more decisions you can make a defense make, the better chance you have to create confusion.”
And it makes you wonder if these Olympics aren’t the last time James and Curry run pick-and-rolls together on the same team.
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