LeBron James and Stephen Curry are the two rivals that headline the latter half of the 2010s. LeBron’s Cleveland Cavaliers met up with Curry’s Golden State Warriors in 4 consecutive NBA Finals. The Warriors won 3 of them, beating an injured Cavaliers team in 2015 before adding Kevin Durant in 2016 to win consecutive titles in 2017 and 2018.
LeBron’s 2016 Cavaliers championship win has been heralded as one of the best of all time, despite injury luck favoring James this time around. Either way, the two stars are forever linked together and recently have become very friendly publicly, with LeBron even saying that he wants to play with Steph one day.
Brian Windhorst and Bill Simmons discussed the possibility of them teaming up, saying that Curry’s possible free agency in 2023 before he signed an extension this offseason.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvwZfit2C34
“I think he was making nice-nice with Curry a couple of years ago, and if Joe Lacob was on this pod, he’d laugh at me, but there was some wonder whether Curry would take that last contract at Golden State. It ended up being 0.0 drama, the Warriors offered the full bulk… Warriors were looking at a $400M payroll, nobody was sure they were going to do it. But I thought he was giving him the wink-wink because he was like ‘if you don’t take that last contract, you can come down to the Lakers’.”
LeBron is a well-known recruiter around the league, and even though it would have taken a lot to happen for Stephen Curry to leave the Warriors, let alone to the Lakers, if somebody had a chance to pull that off, that was LeBron.
How Would LeBron And Curry Have Looked On The Lakers?
If Stephen Curry was an actually attainable player, LeBron probably wouldn’t have signed his contract extension this summer to ensure the Lakers have the absolute max space available to add Curry to their core of LBJ and Anthony Davis.
All 3 players are injury-prone at this point in their careers, so the Lakers’ depth would struggle by virtue of 3 max contract players. However, having LeBron and Curry on one team is incredible enough, let alone with a player of Anthony Davis’ caliber.
Curry and LeBron would both face immense scrutiny for teaming up to form a superteam on the Lakers, a move that would make both players extremely unpopular. This would be the greatest player free agency move since Kevin Durant’s controversial decision to sign with the Warriors. What could have been is something we’ll not know with Curry on one of the most lucrative contracts in NBA history and LeBron extending with the Lakers as well.
