Slight of stature and blessed with an almost pubescent youthfulness, Stephen Curry, the Golden State Warriors point guard, is emblematic of his team’s exhilarating offensive style. Recently crowned league M.V.P., he led the league in made three-pointers by a wide margin this season and owns the third-best career shooting percentage from beyond the arc in history. When Curry dribbles, the ball orbits around his legs and behind his back, then goes whistling off in unexpected directions via no-look passes or in pinpoint parabolas that find the bottom of the net. There is something almost weightless about his elegantly accelerated play.

In his current series against the Memphis Grizzlies, however, Curry has suffered the indignities of the corporeal world. Bum-rushed by brawny defenders at every turn, he hurried jumpers and committed sloppy turnovers. His Warriors, the heavily favored top seed in the Western Conference, were down two games to one before Curry exploded for thirty-three points, eight rebounds, and five assists in Monday night’s critical 101-86 victory. Few anticipated that this matchup would be so competitive, and it has become a proxy war between proponents of the high-octane basketball practiced by Golden State and traditionalists who insist that such systems inevitably falter in the playoffs. It would be foolish to believe that such an argument could be settled by one seven-game series, but suddenly more seems to ride on the outcome of these games than just the hopes of Warriors and Grizzlies fans.

On Monday afternoon, Phil Jackson, the New York Knicks executive who coached title-winning teams in Chicago and Los Angeles, delighted in the postseason struggles of teams like Golden State, the Houston Rockets, and the Atlanta Hawks, who play a similar offensive style. “NBA analysts give me some diagnostics on how 3pt oriented teams are faring this playoffs,” he tweeted. “Seriously, how's it goink?” (He seems to exclude another perimeter-friendly team, the San Antonio Spurs, because their championship pedigree dates back to 1999.) Jackson’s beloved Triangle Offense is itself sophisticated, but its origins predate the three-point shot, and it does not emphasize long-range shooting or high-speed attacks to the extent that contemporary basketball theory advocates. The N.B.A. has undergone strategic evolution over the past decade, driven by advanced metrics, an obsession with efficient shot selection, and the SportVU system of cameras mounted in arena rafters that track every movement on the court. Most teams have embraced the flood of new data, but there are still vocal doubters. To old-school philosophers like Jackson, championships are won in wars of attrition where the pace turns sluggish and jump-shooting teams are throttled.

By both traditional and advanced markers, Golden State dominated the N.B.A. this season. They owned the best record, the best point differential, the best defensive rating, and the second-best offensive rating. (The last two categories are an estimation of points surrendered and scored per hundred possessions.) In the opening round, they swept the New Orleans Pelicans in four games. Steve Kerr, the Warriors’ first-year head coach, inherited a talented team from Mark Jackson, which he left largely intact; his most significant move was making versatile Draymond Green, this year’s runner-up for the league’s Most Improved Player, the team’s starting power forward.

Golden State has thrived by playing distinctively modern basketball. Kerr has installed an offensive system that replaced one-man isolation plays with an emphasis on incessant ball movement. The Warriors race over the court at the fastest tempo in the league, hoist up endless three-pointers, and play big men who have enough shooting range to stretch opposing defenses into wispy spider webs. At its best, the offense, led by Curry, is a whirling maelstrom—the Warriors created more points via assists than any other team in the league. They play outstanding defense, too, anchored by Green and Andrew Bogut (who finished, respectively, second and sixth in voting for the Defensive Player of the Year), but their impressive shooting has led many to regard them as a finesse team.

Memphis, on the other hand, makes basketball appear about as glamorous as digging trenches. The team’s slogan is “Grit ’n’ Grind," the arena is nicknamed the Grindhouse, and the starting point guard, Mike Conley, is currently wearing a protective plastic mask after suffering facial fractures that required metal plates to be inserted under his flesh.

Bucking basketball’s infatuation with perimeter shooting, the Grizzlies attempted the second fewest three-pointers in the N.B.A. during the regular season. Memphis scores its points in the paint, more so than any other team in the league, with Marc Gasol, a seven-feet-one center from Barcelona, acting as the fulcrum of the attack. Gasol possesses polished passing and a consistent mid-range shot for a man of his size, but the team’s offense is clunky and mediocre. They are not averse to advanced metrics—John Hollinger, a noted basketball statistician, is vice-president of basketball operations—but the Memphis offense is not a delicate, filigreed affair.

Instead, the Grizzlies win with a defense (ranked fourth best in the N.B.A. over the regular season) that creates the claustrophobic tension of an axe fight in an elevator. Tony Allen, a lanky wing, embodies the team’s dogged, disciplined spirit. “I ain’t never known us to be no fancy, run-up-the-score, Golden State kind of team,” he said after a November victory. Allen earned his nickname, the Grindfather, by gumming up the gears of scoring machines like Kevin Durant of the Oklahoma City Thunder. The ungodly effort he devotes to defense—clawing around picks, lunging into passing lanes, studying hours of video to learn opponents’ tendencies—is emulated by the rest of the team.

Allen spent the first three games of the series against Golden State haranguing Klay Thompson, Curry’s sweet-shooting backcourt partner. After a steal in Game Two, Allen repeatedly barked “First Team All-Defense” to anyone within earshot. Soon the slogan was inscribed on signs around the arena and being chanted by the crowd. But Allen is not a scoring threat, and Kerr exploited his weakness in Game Four. The Warriors guarded Allen with Bogut, the center, who patrolled the paint and dared him to shoot. The unconventional tactic worked: Allen went two for nine from the floor, scoring only four points, and spent only sixteen minutes on the court.

After the Grizzlies took the series lead in Game Three, Twitter was alight with “jig is up” sentiments: the Warriors had been exposed as a fraudulent contender; having gone six for twenty-six from the arc for two straight games, their gimmick was done for. Then came Game Four, in which Golden State’s humming offense launched thirty-three three-pointers and drained a whopping fourteen of them. The rest of the series will likely continue to act as a referendum on modern basketball strategy. If Curry and the Warriors prevail, the skepticism of Phil Jackson and others will surely endure, at least for a few more weeks. In the N.B.A., championship rings are still the data points that count.