There’s a point here, I promise: I grew up a fan of the New Jersey Nets. They moved them to Brooklyn in a cynical cash grab, so I, essentially, gave up my Nets fandom and adopted the Orlando Magic as my team for a minute. It turns out it was very hard to follow the post-Dwight Howard Magic from where I was living in central Pennsylvania, plus basketball became my primary job function, so I stopped having a team altogether.
This is to say that I’ve never rooted for a basketball team that had LeBron James on it, nor have I rooted for a basketball team that had Steph Curry on it. Yes, there have been plenty of times when I — like most other people in this field, to be clear — have been captivated by them, and have wanted to see how far they could take the game of basketball, but I’ve never experienced a strong emotional response to their teams winning or losing.
These Olympics have been different. Curry famously has never suited up for the U.S. on this stage before, while James last played for the United States in 2012, a point in his career when he was not an especially popular guy among non-Heat fans. They are the two players who have come to define this era of basketball — James is the best or second-best player of all time, while Curry has revolutionized the game and the way people in it have embraced the three-point line. They clearly hold one another in the highest personal and professional regard, a pair of kids from Akron who have pushed themselves to the limits of what should be possible in this sport.
As an American, the Olympics have given me an opportunity to root for both of them, to have a personal investment in a basketball team that is built around the two of them as they are entering the final chapters of their respective careers. And if I can be 100 percent honest: It kicks ass.
This was obvious throughout the lead-up to the Olympics and in the first handful of games the team played. Team USA is basically led by this generation’s version of Bird and Magic, two all-time greats whose professional rivalry has always come from a place of deep respect for one another. And seeing them cook alongside one another, dressed in the same uniform for the first time in games with some stakes to them and not the All-Star Game, has been a joy.
But Thursday’s win against Serbia was different. Curry had not gotten into the groove we know he’s capable of getting into prior to that game, while James had been great, but never had to do the thing where he uses the fact that he’s the smartest and most physically imposing player on the floor to get his team across the finish line. The U.S. had been able to overpower every team up to this point in the competitive games, and while they had some tests in the scrimmages before the Olympics, the stakes were not there.
Serbia provided something different, a worthy adversary which got embarrassed by the Americans in the Olympic opener and were led by the best player in the world right now. They were always going to bring their A++ game, and credit to them, they did just that — Nikola Jokic played like a man possessed, Bogdan Bogdanovic played out of his damn mind, and the speed and precision with which Serbia moved the ball led to good look after good look and carved up the vaunted American defense.
And yet they did not have LeBron James and Steph Curry. The former battled against Jokic defensively, especially in the fourth quarter, while becoming the first player to have multiple Olympic triple-doubles. The latter was the primary reason Serbia’s lead never got to be more than 17, his 36 points one shy of the American men’s Olympic record. They did what they always do, and as a result, a guy like Joel Embiid had his best performance in an American uniform, too, against his biggest individual rival, while Kevin Durant waited in the wings and scored seven of his nine points in the fourth quarter, each make more devastating than the last.
(Aside: A quick word on Kevin Durant, who is on the Mount Rushmore of players from this era with Curry and James. Watching a team with him on it, too? Incredibly good. He’s always there for Team USA, so we’ve witnessed his greatness on this stage over and over, but my god, putting him on a team with those two is ridiculous. Rooting for him to knock down a midrange jumper is like rooting for the sun to come up in the east. You can sense the dread in the other team when he gets going. What a player.)
It’s something special, knowing that you are watching an all-time great team made up of all-time great players. International competition lends itself to that in a unique way, one, because it is so rare that we get to see this in the sport of basketball, and two, because there’s such a natural entry point into the games due to the weird sense of patriotism that overcomes people. It happens all the time in soccer, but it happens only at the Olympics and, to a lesser extent, the World Cup in basketball. Those moments lead to things like the Dream Team becoming a cultural phenomenon, or the Redeem Team’s return to the sport’s mountaintop feeling like a big deal — hell, even the 2004 team’s failure at the Olympics that felt like a disaster because, well, the United States men’s team just does not do that.
Thursday was the first time that it really felt like we were witnessing a “Capital M” Moment with this version of the United States men’s basketball team, the sort of game that gets pointed to by fans for a generation when they’re arguing why this is the best collection of American men to ever suit up at the Olympics. All of it was possible because of LeBron and Steph, a pair that are no longer at the height of their powers, but can still reach those heights when necessary and remind you that this is their game, with both players building Hall of Fame legacies via their wars with the other. Go back and watch the final buzzer, where James emphatically corrals a miss by Bogdanovic as the horn sounds, and Curry runs right into his arms in a moment reminiscent, funny enough, of when Kevin Love sprinted to LeBron as the Cavs won Game 7 of the NBA Finals in Oakland at Curry’s expense. It was a truly remarkable thing to watch.
There’s one game left of watching these two team up in a non All-Star Game setting, unless we get some sort of last dance with the two of them teaming up somewhere — maybe LeBron goes to the Warriors, maybe Steph goes to the Lakers, maybe both decide that they’re going to do the homecoming thing and suit up for the Cavs for a year, who knows. But if Saturday is the end of this short road, and we never see them play a competitive game together again, I’m glad to know that I, finally, got to witness the two of them doing their thing alongside one another — and enjoying every single moment of it — for the team I wanted to win.