Earlier this season, LeBron James says that he doesn’t feel that the Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers have a rivalry, despite the fact that the two teams have matched up in the NBA Finals for the past two seasons. Today, during All-Star Weekend, James shared a similar sentiment, but on an individual level. From ESPN’s Chris Haynes:
“I don’t have a rivalry with Steph Curry,” James said after Saturday’s All-Star practice session. “There’s no way you can say, ‘Let’s talk about rivalries,’ and you say, ‘Bird and Magic. Carolina, Duke. Ohio State, Michigan,’ and then say ‘LeBron and Steph.’
“It’s disrespectful to those other three that I just named that you would even try to put us in the class with that. We haven’t had enough battles, and who’s to say we will have future battles. We’ll see, but to put us in a category with [them], it’s impossible. You can’t do it.”
I disagree with LeBron James. You can call Warriors-Cavaliers a rivalry without saying that it’s on par with the Magic-Bird rivalry. Not all rivalries are created equal; saying that James and Curry have a rivalry is not equivalent to saying that they have one of the greatest rivalries of all time.
