Is there a nine-year-old kid left in America pretending to be LeBron James? They all want to be Steph Curry. Photograph by Garrett Ellwood / NBAE via Getty

Some prominent N.B.A. retirees love the idea that Stephen Curry is coddled by refs and would never have gotten away with his jump-shooting style back in the day. This is sheer nonsense. On a play-by-play basis, defenses conspire to make Curry’s game, with or without the ball, a living hell. In Game One of the N.B.A. Finals, while trying to curl his way around LeBron James, Curry (without the ball) let the side of his face ride on James’s elbow, which James graciously refused to lower. For that moment, the game, or the game-within-the-game, was James’s funny bone rubbing itself as nastily as possible along Curry’s jawline, as Curry pushed back, his neck straining to keep his head upright, his hips laboring to swivel him into the clear. No whistle, let ’em play.

More, perhaps, than in any series since the heyday of Bird and Magic, the N.B.A. Finals are a matchup of Goliath versus Goliath. As it happens, an old friend of mine is now a part owner of the Warriors, and so, for the second year in a row, I scored courtside tickets to the first two games. From that close, when J.R. Smith, early in the first half of Game One, dove for a loose ball, the squeal his hand made running across hardwood was like something out of “The Revenant.” Later, on a loose ball under the Cavaliers’ basket, Andre Iguodala rescued both ball and himself from landing out of bounds—the ball, if I remember correctly, was cradled in his right palm as he steadied himself with the fingertips of his left. It was the single most athletic thing I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. Most of all, with that sort of proximity, you see how an N.B.A. game is all about the maximal exploitation of the smallest opportunity. Not quite seven minutes in, Curry realized—after he and Kevin Love competed for a loose ball, and Love, unable to recover his balance, fell out of the action—that the Warriors would have a five-on-four advantage. Sure enough, it went Curry to Draymond Green to Andrew Bogut for an alley-oop dunk.

Walking into Oracle Arena, where the Warriors play their home games, is like strapping on a virtual-reality mask. You have to remind yourself that this seeming immersive facsimile of something you’re accustomed to watching in 2-D is real. At one point, James careened onto the two people seated next to me, and, as he struggled to disentangle himself, his face, inches from mine, froze, as if it were pressed up against the convex interior of a TV screen. Pomo reverie aside, there is no way to experience LeBron in the flesh other than viscerally. How can a human being that large move that quickly? At close range, his first step, especially on a baseline drive, feels nonsensical. (Though it is often prettier than his last; he finishes his many drives with a contorted flail.) LeBron James is a linebacker who can play all five basketball positions; he’s a beast of a defender, and at times a clairvoyant passer. And yet, even if he and his teammates do everything right, he may have to watch as a kind of basketball angel turns him into yesterday’s news.

The Warriors’ scoring efficiency—the number of points scored per possession—is so high, thanks largely to all the three-point shots they hit, that there may be nothing a Goliath of the old variety can do to keep pace. The Thunder thought they’d found the secret: dominate on the glass, and thereby create enough additional shots to nullify the three-point premium enjoyed by the Warriors. In addition to out-rebounding the Warriors, the Thunder’s hands, it seemed, were everywhere—breaking up passes, grabbing loose balls, tomahawking the rock loose after a rebound. And it nearly worked. But then the tiny window they’d kept so successfully shut was opened by a fraction; and the next thing they knew, the series they’d ruled was over. Neither Kevin Durant nor Russell Westbrook looked as if he knew what hit him.

What hit them was the Warriors’ offense, of course. It is, first and foremost, a series of ruses designed to lure the opposing defense into sagging, ever so slightly, away from Steph Curry—and then the ball returns to him, and up it goes. As my friend, the team’s co-owner, pointed out, “The play in the N.B.A. now is to pick-and-roll, to force a switch, and get the mismatch. Only now, it’s not to get a Big on a Small, it’s to get a Small on a Big”—i.e., to force a bigger, slower player out on the perimeter to defend a smaller, quicker player, who can lock his opponent’s ankles by faking a drive or a jumper, then have his way doing the opposite.

At the center of everything the Warriors do is Curry, who shoots without seeming to catch the ball first. Is there a nine-year-old kid left in America pretending to be LeBron James? They all want to be Curry;_ I_ want to be Curry. Lightsome Curry, so relatable, in the current Hollywood parlance, only seems to have made the load on LeBron James’s shoulders that much heavier. James appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated when he was seventeen years old and has been toting that awful word, “legacy,” around with him since. As a result, his career, while astonishing in every way, has played out in a kind of twilight, in the future-perfect tense: Imagine what, one day, he will have been!

In search of legacy, last year James went into the Finals without the forward Kevin Love, lost to a shoulder injury, only to have the point guard Kyrie Irving go down in Game One to a gruesome leg injury. This year, with both All Stars now healthy and playing well, LeBron and company dispatched their opponents in the Eastern Conference with ease. But, much as Cleveland is largely an Old Economy city, the Cavaliers are, despite a flurry of three-point shooting in the play-offs, mostly an Old N.B.A. team—and they are going up against efficiency incarnate. In Game One, Curry had neither the eye nor the legs to astonish the home crowd, but efficiency is an unjealous god, an the improbable trio of Harrison Barnes, Shaun Livingston, and Leandro Barbosa shot a combined 19–25, or seventy-six per cent, from the field.

“Efficiency” began its life as a Progressive Era shibboleth. It was Frederick Winslow Taylor’s term for making work more productive by routinizing and specializing it to the point that all “waste” was eliminated. All of society could be made “efficient,” could be industrially reëngineered to achieve higher and higher levels of output. At the factory level, business level, and micro-economic level, the manager made operations more “efficient.” At the macro level, in the guise of the “public man,” he made society fair, by redistributing some of efficiency’s magic surplus to workers. “Efficiency” once implied grandiose industrial might and a full-employment economy.

Starting in the nineteen-eighties, “efficiency” began its semantic migration; now it’s a financial term, for bringing price into line with value. What once described the smoothly functioning factory now describes a smoothly functioning market. It has become, accordingly, a ruthlessly spic-and-span euphemism for downsizing the domestic industrial workforce, for pricing labor according to its cheapest foreign equivalent. Everywhere, “efficiency” makes what was once thought permanent disappear. Why should basketball be any different? “I don’t enjoy being as nonefficient as I was,” James said as last year’s Finals slipped away. “I don’t enjoy dribbling the ball for countless seconds on the shot clock and the team looking at me to make a play.”

In Game Two, the play started out sloppy, the score stayed tight. Only Andrew Bogut, the Warriors’ Australian center, seemed ready to play, blocking shot after shot. And then Draymond Green was everywhere, Curry and Klay Thompson buried some threes, and the Cavaliers night was done early. Curry finished the night 7–11 from the field, the very soul of efficiency. The Cavs, meanwhile, ran “iso” after “iso,” that is, they isolated their star players and waited for something to happen. It didn’t. The Warriors won a record seventy-three games in the regular season, but for their last and greatest trick, they are turning the once state-of-the-art majesty of LeBron—a.k.a. King James—into file footage from another era. With their vaunted efficiency, they have, in other words, done the unthinkable: converted the overdog to end all basketball overdogs into a kind of elegiac hero.