Corner Three LeBron had an N.B.A. finals Game 1 for the ages against Golden State this year. But best of all time? 2001 Allen Iverson would like to have a word. AFP PHOTO/MIKE NELSON You ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I’ll field three questions posed via email at sportsnyt@gmail.com. (Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you’re writing in from, to enhance the chances your question is chosen.) Q: How should we expect the Kawhi Leonard situation to unfold from here? — James Schwemlein



STEIN: San Antonio's phones are ringing. Interested teams are calling, eager to made Leonard trade proposals, whether the Spurs want to take the calls or not. But to this point they haven't made Leonard available via trade.



This would suggest that the Spurs' patriarch, Gregg Popovich, is sticking to his intention to try to meet with Leonard face to face to make his own determination about the depths of Leonard's dissatisfaction and whether the partnership can be salvaged.



My read is that the Spurs believe Leonard is not quite as determined to exit San Antonio as his advisers are. The team would naturally want to hear that directly from Kawhi before taking the unenviable step of putting perhaps the game's best two-way player (when healthy) on the trading block.



I will say this, though: If Kawhi indeed conveys those sentiments straight to Pop, after months and months of very un-Spurs-like drama, that's when things could change — dramatically.



Popovich appeased a discontented LaMarcus Aldridge last summer when Aldridge told him their partnership wasn't working, but the full extent of Aldridge's unhappiness wasn't known publicly until Pop himself revealed it after the fact. These circumstances are different. For the first time in the Popovich era, tension and unflattering headlines have been mounting for months.



If Leonard says he no longer wants to be part of the program, I can certainly envision Pop taking great umbrage to that and deciding then to accommodate him. But it's simply not San Antonio's style to rush into that sort of move.



The only firm deadline here is Feb. 7, 2019. That's the N.B.A.'s next trade deadline. The Spurs can't risk keeping a disgruntled Leonard beyond that point, since he'll have the right to pass on the final season of his current contract to become a free agent in July 2019. But the next steps in this saga realistically won't unfold as quickly as the trade-hungry masses out there want them to.



Q: LeBron James had a great Game 1 in the N.B.A. finals, which prompted people to say at the time that it was the best individual finals performance that they had ever seen. Then Kevin Durant had a great Game 3 and people said the same thing. Recency bias can explain only some of those reactions. Were those games really two of the best ever? — William Pennington (Seattle, Wash.)



STEIN: Those were indeed two of the finest finals performances we've ever seen — and some of the gushing inevitably went too far. But, hey, there are worse crimes than making prisoner-of-the-moment sports proclamations that don't fully consider the game's history when they're spouted (or tweeted).



The truth is that there have been so many all-time eruptions in the finals that we would need to devote a whole newsletter to try to properly rank them.



It gets marginally easier, in the case of LeBron's 51-point masterpiece to open the 2018 finals, if we try to limit the discussion to outstanding performances in finals defeat. Even then, though, I'm not sure how to definitively put that performance ahead of Isiah Thomas' unforgettable 25-point third quarter in Game 6 of the 1988 finals against the Lakers when he also sustained a nasty ankle injury. Or Jerry West's defiant Game 7 in 1969 (42 points, 13 rebounds and 12 assists) which helped him clinch finals M.V.P. honors even though his Lakers lost the series decider at home to Bill Russell's Celtics by two points. This becomes a conversation with many more layers when we start going through other triumphant performances. Such as: Magic Johnson in the clinching Game 6 of the 1980 N.B.A. finals when he started at center in place of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and played the game of his life. Michael Jordan in the famed "flu game" at Utah in Game 5 of the 1997 finals. And one that still stands out in my memory even though there are so many worthy contenders to consider: Allen Iverson's 48 points in Game 1 of the 2001 finals to lead Philadelphia past a Lakers juggernaut that had won its previous 19 games. Durant's Game 3 earlier this month essentially won him a second consecutive finals M.V.P. trophy. And LeBron became just the sixth player in finals history to record a 50-point game with his Game 1 performance. They'll probably have to settle for those superlatives for now.



Q: I understand the best-player-in-the-world appeal of LeBron, as well as the argument for doing everything you can to sign him in free agency if that’s even a possibility. But Houston came miraculously close to toppling Golden State, even with all of its injuries. Would we be in a better position to win with LeBron or to keep our core and focus instead on improving the shallow rotational depth we saw in the Golden State series? — Matt Goodman (Dallas-based Houstonian)



STEIN: As well-conceived as your thoughts are here, my suspicion is that the way you started your question is how you really feel.



The Rockets have to go for it with King James if they have a chance. You know it. I know it. Houston General Manager Daryl Morey knows it. How could you live with yourself if you chose continuity over the delicious possibilities with LeBron alongside James Harden and Chris Paul?



How much of the current core would have to be sacrificed to make the money work? Does Morey have a secret trade solution stored up to shed the onerous final two seasons of Ryan Anderson's contract and make a LeBron pursuit so much simpler? Does LeBron really have issues with the city of Houston, as reported recently, to make this all moot?



Morey's track record in building up the Rockets to this point should earn him the leeway to try anything to make his run at LeBron, which we've been talking about in this space for some time because there's no recruiter out there that James is more apt to listen to than Paul.