LeBron James stared into the camera after the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Golden State Warriors in a Christmas Day thriller and decided to address the elephant in the room. For years, Christmas has been the NBA’s premier regular season showcase, only in 2024, that looked like it was not going to be the case for too much longer. Its slate of games lost some luster over the course of the year due to injuries and teams not quite meeting their preseason expectations, while the NFL put four playoff teams on the air, along with a halftime performance in one of the games by Beyoncé.
It set up for a pretty familiar feeling, one where the NBA does something and it doesn’t matter, because it is not football. And then, the games happened. Four of the five on the NBA side of things were spectacular displays of the sport played at the highest level. One of the NFL games was a dud and the other (the one that had Beyoncé!) was something even worse than a dud the league hadn’t seen since the 1960s. Considering all of this, along with a Lakers win where he was excellent, James looked dead into the camera and said something that sure seemed like he’d prepared to say if the situation presented itself.
“I love the NFL,” James said, “but Christmas is our day.”
The entire day came at what feels like an increasingly strange spot for the NBA. For some reason, everyone has a theory for why things are, in their eyes, going poorly for the league. Defining “going poorly” is pretty impossible and varies from person to person, but for the most part, it involves pointing at ratings and then blaming it on whatever longstanding issue the person has had with the NBA, with problems ranging from “they shoot too many threes” to “Charles Barkley doesn’t take his job seriously enough” to “there are too many uniforms”, among numerous others.
This is all happening at the exact same time that the NFL (and college football) is more popular than ever. Football is as American as [insert bad simile here], and its ability to envelop anything and everything it wants is pretty remarkable. The slow creep into Christmas has gone on for a few years, but in 2024, things were taken to a new level by Roger Goodell and company. The NFL had the bigger games than the NBA. The NFL had the bigger stars from the world of entertainment than the NBA. The NFL had the flashy new streaming platform, while the NBA had ESPN, where Stephen A. Smith and Kendrick Perkins hit their word count goals admirably.
But there’s this funny thing about the NBA, which is that for all the bellyaching about one thing or another, the league is better than ever in a number of different ways. It has never had the level of talent spread across the entire league quite like it has now. The very best players in the league are capable of reaching heights no one else ever has. It just worked out a new, $76 billion media rights deal that Adam Silver seems morally opposed to bringing up whenever anyone asks him about the league’s perceived ratings problem in literally any capacity.
Other than that last thing, you can see this by simply turning on a basketball game and watching the level of play. I promise you, as someone who has to watch all of this stuff for a living, the act of sitting down and watching a good basketball game is as good as it gets — again, the level of skill and refinement that exists league-wide is worthy of celebration. Yes, you’re gonna get duds every night when each team plays 82 games (although it is fair to wonder if anything is as bad as a 31-2 NFL game involving two teams that could play at some point in the postseason), but you’re also going to get some absolutely sensational basketball if you know where to look.
Christmas Day served as an emphatic reminder of that. Victor Wembanyama was the latest superstar to have a monster game at Madison Square Garden, as his 42 points were the most that any visitor has ever scored in MSG, but it came in a tight loss to the Knicks. The Mavs, despite trailing by as many as 28 points and seeing Luka Doncic leave with an injury, scratched and clawed their way back before ultimately coming up a bit short against Anthony Edwards and the Wolves. The Sixers, which desperately needed to show some guts, did just that by holding off the Celtics in Boston for their biggest win of the year, and while Nuggets-Suns was the worst game of the day, it still featured two of the 20 or so greatest players of all time in Nikola Jokic and Kevin Durant.
And yet, as has often been the case in the NBA over the years, no two players reminded people of why the game of basketball is so great better than LeBron James and Steph Curry. The two immortals wrote the latest chapter of the greatest rivalry between a pair of individuals since Magic vs. Bird, and you can make a pretty strong case they’ve surpassed that by now. They consistently found answers, they made big plays, hit big shots (Curry even got a double “bang!” from Mike Breen), and rose to meet the moment that inherently comes whenever they step on the floor together. This battle was won by James, maybe the next one will be won by Curry, and before we know it, we’ll blink and realize that there are no more battles for them.
In a number of ways, James and Curry are the two main characters in the story of the NBA over the last 20 years. Even as Father Time is catching up to them, there are few things as good as a game where LeBron is in total control of his surroundings, or Steph tells the rest of the Warriors that he’ll take care of everything — in my lifetime, the list of athletes as consistently magnetic and compelling as these two is awfully short. Beyond all the incredible things that they do off the court, at the end of the day, everything with them comes back to the brilliance they’re capable of producing on it.
There’s a lesson in there for the NBA to take away and apply to itself. A major part of the reason that fans think the NBA is in a state of crisis is how the NBA — the most online professional sports league by some margin — reacts to things. Why would fans not think that, say, the All-Star Game is broken to the point that it triggers an existential crisis when the commissioner and numerous past and present players act like it is? Why would fans not think that there are too many threes being taken when James says there are too many threes being taken, or Silver says the league is “constantly having discussions about whether there are ways to improve stylistically the game on the floor.”
Of course, dismissing criticisms out of hand is not the right answer, but the league shouldn’t spend so much time publicly trying to respond to every critique that gains a bit of traction online. Aside from the benefit of playing football, the NFL’s greatest strength is in its messaging as a league and getting the discourse to bend to its will (which, to be clear, is not always a good thing). They also tinker with the rules constantly (see: the awful new kickoffs), but they’re better than any sports entity at steering and controlling the conversation to, eventually, end at their desired destination, which is that the NFL is the best thing to ever exist.
With that in mind, think about the quote from Silver just above. How, exactly, is anyone supposed to square that quote with what he said right before that?
“I think the game is in a great place,” Silver said, according to Tim Bontemps of ESPN. “I love watching the games, and I think we have some of the most skilled athletes in the world competing — and it’s unfair, I think, to the players to lump them into categories as 3-point shooters or a midrange shooter or big man playing under the basket. It’s an amazing game.”
Basketball is, truly, an amazing game — I am extraordinarily biased as someone who makes a living watching it, but I do not think there is a better game on earth. For myriad reasons, the game can feel like it’s either broken or secondary to the off-court drama that, to be clear, is compelling in its own right. On Christmas, we got a reminder of just how great the game of basketball can be as it went head-to-head with the monolith that it has long tried its hardest to avoid (which is a lesson in and of itself). Now, the NBA and everyone around it has to spend the next 364 days remembering this, acting like this, and doing whatever it can to put everyone’s focus and attention on how great the NBA is when played at its highest level.