Why no Steph Curry vs. LeBron James in 2025-26 season is a loss for everybody

SAN FRANCISCO – Two legends of the game were supposed to close out Chase Center on Thursday night in the Warriors’ final home game of the 2025-26 NBA regular season. A playoff game here is far from a guarantee. Whenever the Warriors and Los Angeles Lakers play each other, it’s less about the teams and more so about enjoying Steph Curry and LeBron James sharing the same court. Unfortunately for both players, for both teams and for both fan bases, that didn’t happen this season — not even once in the four games these two teams played against each other. That in itself is a loss for the entire league and the game of basketball as a whole, not knowing how many more of these games we’re going to get, if any at all.Health comes first for the Warriors, knowing they’re locked into the No. 10 seed and a date in the NBA play-in tournament. Managing Curry’s runner’s knee that held him out for more than two months is priority No. 1. So on the first night of a back-to-back, Curry was one of eight Warriors ruled out against James and the Lakers in an eventual 119-103 loss.James said after the game that he and Curry talked about it, and didn’t realize they hadn’t played against each other until the day of the game. Maybe Thursday was James’ last game at Chase Center. Maybe he won’t be wearing Lakers colors after this season. Maybe he’ll be hanging it up for good, or maybe the worst kept secret in the NBA of the Warriors’ wandering eyes can take him from LA to San Francisco. “We never know. We don’t what the future holds, and we don’t know if we’ll get the opportunity to play against each other,” James said. “It’s always a pleasure and it’s always an honor just to be in his presence, to be on the floor with him like we have in the past.” There still was plenty of love between Curry and James before tipoff. Curry came into the arena wearing a pair of Nike LeBron 10 IDs from 2013 as part of his sneaker free agency. James was all smiles when he caught a glimpse of Curry’s kicks before the game. Steph threw it back with his Nike LeBron 10 IDs tonight pic.twitter.com/p13n92UeQS — Warriors on NBCS (&commat;NBCSWarriors) April 10, 2026 “He got those things from the vault,” James said. “For real, for real. I remember him wearing those. … I’m not sure if he had an extra pair or if those were the actual ones, but he went to the vault for those.”Shoes were the closest thing between them, and their only connection for the duration of the season.The Warriors and Lakers played each other in the regular-season opener. Curry scored 23 points, and James missed the game because of sciatica. The two teams then played each other twice during Curry’s absence from runner’s knee, with James recording a 20-point, 10-assist double-double the first game and 22 points and nine assists the second.In what was the last chance for these two to play each other this season, barring a playoff surprise, Curry watched from the sidelines as James defied Father Time against the Warriors’ JV squad, again flirting with a triple-double and finishing with 26 points, eight rebounds and 11 assists.Now that the season series for the Warriors and Lakers is over, the NBA went an entire season without fans watching Curry and James battle for basketball supremacy for the first time in six years. “They’ve been the faces of the league for a long, long time and it’s been fun to watch as a fan,” Lakers coach JJ Redick said during his pregame press conference. “It’s been fun to be a part of it the last couple of years.”Adam Silver’s NBA has been run by two players whose first names are even more recognizable than their last: Steph and LeBron. This is their league, their era. But for how much longer is the real question. The first full season Silver took over for David Stern as the league’s commissioner was the first year Curry and James played each other in the NBA Finals, starting a stretch of four straight campaigns of them meeting on the grand stage to crown a champion.Respect has been earned and admired by Curry and James. An all-time rivalry comes with the territory of greatness. “I think rivalries in general are defined by playoff matchups,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said. “That’s kind of the history of the way we look at Wilt [Chamberlain] vs. Bill Russell, Bird-Magic. I think they had three Finals confrontations. What would some of the other ones be? I don’t know. Steph and LeBron has to be up there.” If playoff matchups define rivalries, Curry and James fit the criteria. And Curry has the upper hand, beating James in three of the four Finals they’ve faced one another, as well as winning 17 of the 28 playoff games between them. James has him beat in the regular season, with 14 wins on his side and 13 for Curry. For the past 12 seasons, Kerr has coached Curry’s Warriors and competed against James on the Lakers and Cleveland Cavaliers. He has had the opportunity to be part of one of basketball’s great modern rivalries, and was the man on the sidelines as they came together on Team USA two summers ago at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics. As well as anybody from a leadership standpoint, Kerr has seen the full scope of their greatness. He gets it, he respects it and he’ll always appreciate it. “It’s just the love for the game,” Kerr said. “The love for the competition, the process, the work. I think all great players share an obsession with the game itself. It’s a love for the game. It’s an obsession with getting better, with competing. All the guys who I have either played with or coached, you can just see – I mean, it means everything to them. “When you combine that with incredible talent, which both guys have – Steph has the greatest hand eye coordination of anybody on earth, and LeBron is probably the greatest athlete, physical specimen, that I’ve ever seen. You get those qualities combined and this is the result. There’s a reason they’re both still going. They love it, and they’re obsessed with it.” LeBron is 41 and will be an unrestricted free agent after the season. Steph is 38 and has one more year on his current contract. The ball, as it always has been, is in their court. While the Warriors’ home finale was a loss on the scoreboard and even bigger L for basketball, the two faces that have defined a generation of greatness have given the NBA too many wins to count, and one can’t fathom the memories ever being replicated.Download and follow the Dubs Talk Podcast

Why no Steph Curry vs. LeBron James in 2025-26 season is a loss for everybody

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