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Fans had spent all of January 25 looking forward to the season’s first game between the Warriors and the San Antonio Spurs. It wasn’t only a meeting of the two best teams in the league, but also a clash of methods. Compared with the Warriors’ blink-quick pace and intricate patterns, the Spurs’ tactics seem almost hokey; they play forbidding defense and generally prefer the short jumper to the long one. For Golden State, it was the latest in an endless series of tests, and for the viewing public, it was appointment television.

Curry took his first shot from a spot closer to the Warriors’ center-court logo than to the three-point line, nearly 30 feet from the rim. It dropped cleanly, proving something of a thesis statement for the evening. Curry spent the next three quarters—the Golden State lead grew so large that he sat out the fourth—evading San Antonio’s defense in every way imaginable, skipping down the lane for one-handed layups or popping into open space for jumpers. What was predicted to be one of the season’s best and closest contests ended up like so many other Warriors games have this season: as little more than a demonstration of the Curry phenomenon. He scored 37 points in 28 minutes that night, but more to the point, he inverted the odds of the game, making the most difficult shots look like the easiest.

Curry has, these days, a folk hero’s following. In Oakland and in arenas across the country, fans arrive early to Warriors games to see his fabled warm-up routine, wherein he dribbles two basketballs at once, whipping them between his legs and behind his back, hits strings of shots from near the midcourt line, and often tosses in one final shot from far out of bounds just before disappearing into the locker room. Curry’s jersey is the NBA’s top seller. He has reached a sphere of celebrity that allowed President Obama, during the Warriors’ recent White House visit, to allude playfully to his and Curry’s golf rivalry.

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Two nights after the Warriors’ victory over the Spurs, ESPN’s NBA Countdown crew was covering the recent firing of Cleveland’s head coach. In discussing LeBron James’s role in the move, Doris Burke, the show’s host, used the accepted honorific: “the best player in the world.” Despite the fact that Curry won last year’s MVP award and the near-assurance that he will do so again this season, Burke’s label didn’t raise any eyebrows. Indeed, James’s continued place atop the basketball world remains a matter of fact to many.

James himself used the phrase last June, when his Cavaliers trailed Curry’s Warriors three games to two in the Finals, saying, “I feel confident because I’m the best player in the world.” Opposing coaches regularly resort to the phrase to drive home the enormity of their task when facing James. Writers at Grantland and the Wall Street Journal have featured it in their opening paragraphs. Considering James’s unprecedented combination of strength, speed, and intelligence—he’s a linebacker-sized Swiss Army Knife—putting him atop basketball’s hierarchy is a defensible position.