Steph Curry and LeBron James faced off in four NBA Finals and finally got to team up this summer in Paris for the 2024 Summer Olympics.
James has said before that Curry is one superstar he’d “love” to play with one day, and he got his wish at the Olympics. The duo played tremendously well off each other, creating a lethal two-man game as Team USA won the gold medal with an undefeated run.
If not for James’ agent, Rich Paul, it’s possible the two era-defining superstars could have teamed up in the NBA, too.
According to longtime NBA insider Marc Stein, Paul was “adamantly opposed to the idea” of James leaving Los Angeles for the Bay Area when the two teams were engaged in preliminary discussions about James’ availability at the ownership level.
From Stein’s Substack:
Sources say Paul implored both teams to scrap the concept — despite some owner-to-owner dialogue between the Warriors’ Joe Lacob and the Lakers’ Jeanie Buss and (Draymond) Green’s determination to lobby James to push for relocation to the Bay Area — largely because he wanted to insulate James from potential backlash over switching teams for the fourth time in his career.
Shortly after last year’s trade deadline, ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski and Ramona Shelburne revealed that the Warriors made an unsuccessful bid to convince the Lakers and James to consider a trade to Golden State. Their reporting included details of Warriors owner Joe Lacob reaching out to Lakers counterpart Jeanie Buss to gauge whether James’ apparent public frustration over the Lakers’ season could provide an opening for a trade. What followed is consistent with Stein’s tick-tock of events.
From ESPN’s Feb. 14 story:
Buss told Lacob the Lakers had no desire to trade James, but that he would need to seek the answer on James’ state of mind from his agent, Klutch Sports CEO Rich Paul, sources said…In the end, the answer was returned resoundingly on the eve of the trade deadline: Paul told Lacob and Warriors GM Mike Dunleavy Jr., that James had no interest in a trade and wanted to remain a Laker, sources said. When Dunleavy reached out to Lakers GM Rob Pelinka in those pretrade deadline hours, Dunleavy had been told the same: The Lakers wanted to keep James, sources said.
The Lakers, of course, held on to James and then signed him to a two-year, $101 million contract this offseason. They also drafted his son, Bronny James, in the second round of the 2024 NBA Draft, fulfilling a longtime dream of the four-time league MVP.
Pursuing James, even if a trade was a pipe dream, represents a steady effort from the Warriors to add a superstar-level player around Curry. They reportedly tried to acquire Paul George via sign-and-trade with the Clippers, but George ended up signing with the 76ers in free agency. Then they turned to Lauri Markkanen, who eventually extended with the Jazz.
With the dust settled on the offseason, the Warriors are poised to enter the 2024-25 season with a roster that improved on the margins but lost franchise icon Klay Thompson and veteran point guard Chris Paul. Golden State added Buddy Hield, Kyle Anderson and De’Anthony Melton to replace them as capable role players.
Yet they still don’t have a true No. 2 scoring option next to Curry, and there doesn’t appear to be a pathway to filling it in a King-sized way.
