Cary Edmondson-USA TODAY Sports
LeBron has been around for a long, long time.
LeBron James vs. Stephen Curry has been the matchup that has defined the NBA of the late 2010s. Their battles in the NBA Finals harbor some of the greatest moments in NBA history, and boast the greatest comeback in Finals history.
The two square off again in the 2023 NBA Playoffs as James’ Lakers face Curry’s Warriors, and before Game 2 of the series, NBA History posted a video of James talking about Curry after watching him play at Davidson.
“Yeah, Stephen Curry?”
“Think he’ll be good in the league?”
“I think so.”
A generation defining matchup. LeBron knew.
LAL at GSW | Game 2 | 9pm/et on ESPN pic.twitter.com/GDIgP8hNKQ
— NBA History (@NBAHistory) May 4, 2023
There are a few things that I think are very interesting about this video. The first one is the longevity of LeBron James. It’s still kind of wild to me that we have video of him discussing players that not only are now at the top of the league, but players he’s been in battles against for such a long time. Steph Curry is in his 14th season in the NBA, yet we have video of James talking about how Steph is going to be a great player in the NBA while he was at Davidson. It would be like if Tom Brady was recorded on video saying Patrick Mahomes would be great in the NFL, but while Mahomes was at Texas Tech.
The next thing is: this is hard for me to believe that LeBron actually believed this, because as Twitter already knows, LeBron is a hilarious liar. This past year, he dropped a little fib about listening to Migos in 2010, but Migos didn’t release any music until 2011. We all know about James saying that he knew Kobe was going to score 81 points, another possibly hilarious lie.
LeBron is an incredibly smart basketball player so maybe his talent evaluation is actually at such a high level that he would predict Stephen Curry being good, it wouldn’t surprise me.
But on the other side of this, he did only predict that Curry would be “good”. This isn’t such a major LeBron guarantee because it seems like multiple NBA teams also thought so. Curry was the 7th overall pick in the NBA Draft, so getting a good player from that spot wouldn’t be the most insane thing ever.
Regardless of whether LeBron was telling the truth or not, the video of him talking about Curry while he was playing at Davidson is extremely cool, considering every battle they’ve been in at the NBA level.
