CLEVELAND, Ohio - Stephen Curry trails LeBron James by one NBA championship, three league MVPS, and millions of dollars in endorsement deals.

Curry's hot streak on the court is well known. He's the best player on the league's best team.

Somehow both Curry and the Golden State Warriors got better from last season, when he won MVP and they beat the Cavs in the Finals.

In short, it's James and the Cavs who are chasing Curry and the Warriors. Curry doesn't see himself in a position of having to genuflect before James. Though mostly respectful of Cleveland's superstar, Curry prefers to pivot in interviews to the here and now - where he and the Warriors are king.

But Curry can't help but admire James, and admit he looks up to him, for the business empire James has built away from basketball.

James, 31, signed a lifetime endorsement deal with Nike that is worth a minimum of $600 million, and likely several hundred million more. He owns a production company, a piece of an English soccer club, and is an actor.

He's a pitchman for Kia, Sprite, and Samsung. He also sells Beats by Dre, the headphone giant in which he was an original investor. Apple bought Beats, so, James is a business partner of both the maker of the iPhone and the Galaxy. Who else can pull that off?

James walked away from McDonald's as a marketing partner so he could focus on Blaze Pizza, a fastfood pizza chain in which he has equity.

Those are examples of sustained, generational wealth and power that aren't going away.

Curry, 27, is just getting started.

"At one point he (James) was going through the exact same thing I'm going through now, and the transition of different phases of your careers," Curry said in Toronto, during the NBA's All-Star weekend. "Any smart person that wants to be successful in life has people that they look up to or follow. ... He's obviously handled that part of his career very well and he's a great influence in that regard."

Curry's is in fact wrong on one point - James never really experienced what Curry is going through now.

James was a national superstar in his early teens. Shortly after becoming the No. 1 pick of the 2003 draft, he had a $90 million shoe deal. At age 18.

Also, when James was much younger than Curry is now, James created his own, small company to manage all of his business deals, and left the management of that company to Maverick Carter. It's been so successful that Harvard's business school studies and teaches the James-Carter business arrangement.

Today, James is the sixth richest athlete in the world, according to Forbes, with at least $44 million a year in endorsements.

In other words, James was always a star. Much of this is new to Curry.

He made his first All-Star game at 25, won his first MVP and championship last year. Curry first signed with Under Armour to wear its shoes and clothes for less than $4 million per year in 2013, according to ESPN.

Curry's got a new deal with the sports apparel maker that includes equity in the company that runs through 2024. Under Armour earned $3.7 billion in sales last year, according to Forbes, but its basketball sales are a tiny fraction of a market dominated by Nike, James, and Michael Jordan.

James' signature Nike shoe, for instance, earned $340 million in sales last year. All of Under Armour's shoes - not just basketball - earned $196 million, according to Forbes.

Curry just signed with Brita, a water filtration company. He's got his own headphones partner, JBL, and endorses Degree deodorant, Muscle Milk, and ZAMST, an ankle-bracelet maker. He models for Express.

Curry's business deals are managed by Octagon, a more traditional athlete brand manager than the company James chose to create with Carter.

"I have a game plan of what I want to represent and what I want to be attached to and kind of what I want to get out of on and off the court opportunities," Curry said.

Curry was asked if he hoped to be the "Michael Jordan" of Under Armour, and he agreed. He said Nike "had a nice template of success with Jordan's career, but I'm trying to do it our way, which is very genuine and organic to what we're trying to do."

It's too soon in Curry's partnership with Under Armour to see what Curry meant by that - what differences there will be in how he's marketed versus Jordan or even James.

Curry enjoys enormous popularity and his polling numbers (he's not running for office, rather, these are surveys done to measure a player's favorability for TV and marketing purposes) are off the charts.

Curry's jersey is the NBA's top seller, he was the leading vote getter for the All-Star Game last year and would've led again for the Toronto game had it not been Kobe Bryant's last.

Like James and Jordan before him, Curry is in prime position to build off that momentum. Still to come is a car endorsement, a pillar of any superstar's marketing portfolio.

If you're keeping score, James didn't sign with Kia until he was 29.