Steph Curry vs. LeBron James: The NBA’s All-Star Appetizer – The Wall Street Journal

Or sort of…but not really. For all the hand-wringing about the NBA’s spiffy prologue tournament, its soft opening before its playoff—“Whoever came up with that [stuff] needs to be fired,” James said, using a mildly more aromatic word than stuff—it isn’t as cold-heartedly do-or die as suggested. The Lakers and Warriors finished the regular season as the Western Conference’s seventh and eighth seeds, respectively, and so, while the winner of Wednesday’s tilt pushes on, the loser survives to play the winner of the contest between 10th-seeded San Antonio and ninth-seeded Memphis, and can still qualify by winning that one. So what we’re really talking about is, the Lakers or the Warriors would have to lose two games, to two different teams, to not make the playoffs, and it’s quite possible they’re both going to wind up making it. Honestly, this cruel, cruel thing is about as cruel as a pickleball mixer. 

Besides, a little pre-playoff intrigue never hurt a sport. If anything, it’s the caffeine jolt the NBA needs after a shortened sleepwalk of a season disrupted by virus protocols and contested in mostly-empty arenas. It’s difficult to pronounce anything “must-see” in an era in which nobody’s watching much of anything—more people watched me try to parallel park my car this weekend (only four tries, thank you very much) than watch mostly anything in prime time these days—but James and Curry going head-to-head in a very meaningful contest is a rivalry with history, and awfully hard to resist. It’s the starriest possible showcase for this play-in format, which debuted last summer in the NBA bubble, and is designed to open the playoff possibilities for more cities and also tamp down on tanking by crummier basketball outfits. 

And if you think the NBA’s format is a little rough, tell it to the “wild card” baseball clubs forced to play a one-off sudden death elimination game after finishing a 90,000 game MLB regular season. That’s rough. This? What basketball’s doing is frothy fun. 

Steph vs. LeBron? Yes, please! Curry is amid a season for the ages—the greatest shooter in NBA history has somehow figured out how to be an even better shooter, routinely lofting the ball from distances that get mortals benched, and rewriting the angles of possibility in the game. Curry is 33 now, and he’s in his Federer phase, that is to say he’s become an experience, someone the sports fan watches not only because he’s so fluid and magical, but also because we might never see someone play like him again. Curry is unadulterated basketball joy—“the MVP of this year,” says none other than LeBron James, a claim that may make Nikola Jokic turn his head—and he’s also this season’s chaos agent, elevating a scattered, injured Golden State club into the Team Nobody Wants to Face. When Steph can score from there, and also there, and there and even there, how can any opponent feel super confident?

James, meanwhile, is coming off a scattered season, one which began brightly, with MVP chatter of his own, but then was derailed by an ankle injury in March. James wound up missing 27 of Los Angeles’s 72 regular-season games, and if you think that’s cause to panic, and reason to short sell the Lakers, well, then you’ve missed the past 18 or so seasons of LeBron James. No player in NBA history has a switch like the 36-year-old Akron native—he literally calls it his “playoff mode”—and while James in December can still be a marvel, what happens right now is a far more intense deal. He’s returned from the ankle, and it’s unclear if he’s gotten enough recovery, but remember: He’s now playing with another 360-degree handful, Anthony Davis. The Lakers are defending champs, and have their band finally back together. 

In the NBA’s East, the Tuesday night play-in drama concerns the seventh-seeded Boston Celtics and the eighth-seeded Washington Wizards, and No. 9 Indiana Pacers and No. 10 Charlotte Hornets. It’s been a bummer season in Boston, a dreadfully underperforming club that actually harbored championship aspirations and now has to contend with a surging Washington team led by human tornado Russell Westbrook, who plays basketball like he’s writing a revenge novel. Pacers-Hornets, meanwhile, will likely be a showcase for Charlotte rookie LaMelo Ball, a delightfully creative distributor who’s turned the improbable, howdhedothat pass into one of the most stirring highlights in sports.  

These games have stakes, which is exactly the idea. Once they’re through, it’s on to the prequalified clubs, like the East’s No. 1 seed, Philadelphia, and No. 1 Utah in the West, plus very good teams in Phoenix and Milwaukee, and then, of course, the mysterious James Harden-Kevin Durant-Kyrie Irving juggernaut in Brooklyn, which, due to injuries and other absences, has been kept under a canvas wrap like one of those prototype sports cars Dan Neil gets to drive, and road-tested only a handful of times. A fully loaded Brooklyn team feels like the championship, attention-sucking favorite, but then, over the bridge, you’ve got the reborn New York Knicks, at 41-31, a shocking fourth seed. The NBA wanted more crazy in its postseason? Knicks are good, this already feels crazy enough.

Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com