LeBron's already annoyed in Steph's house

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OAKLAND, Calif. -- He's an unlikely bully, that Stephen Curry.

"He looks like he's 12," says his coach, Steve Kerr.

But here he is, strangling the NBA with his bare hands.

A title, 73 wins, 402 3-pointers, stratospheric favorable ratings among an adoring public, the top-selling jersey, the top-selling shoe. The young fan is enraptured, and the older fan reawakened to the wonders of basketball. Who knew it could be like this?

Nobody can stop Steph, not two on the ball, not the agile big man on the switch, not a generation of retired curmudgeons who preceded him and insist he couldn't survive in the NBA cage match of yesteryear, and not the superstars of this era who define "valuable" differently and want order restored to a time not so long ago, when the dominant wing lorded his talents over the basketball world.

A month ago, it looks as if they've all ducked the bully, at least for the time being. As his teammates rush through the tunnel at the Moda Center in Portland to and from warmups, a hobbled Curry can be found loitering outside the locker room in sweatpants and flip-flops after laboring through a game of two-on-two against his assistant coaches hours before Game 3 tipoff. Then two nights later, the Game 4 explosion -- 40 points off the bench, 17 in overtime alone.

Across the country, LeBron James has mounted his own spring offensive, not so much against the middling Eastern Conference bracket -- which he has dispatched in 14 games over six weeks -- but against the weight of this strange upheaval. Where did this damn league lose its bearings?

Even the commissioner can hardly contain himself as he delivers his annual State of the League address before Game 1 of the Finals in Oakland. Adam Silver delivers a paean to Curry as he gushes about the transformation of the game: Steph is Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile. Steph has shattered "a psychological barrier" that has kept shooters from reaching Steph-like heights. Steph "changes the whole dynamic of our game. I tell you, it's just incredibly exciting." Curry might not have blown up the first basketball, but Silver spends nearly two minutes enumerating how the MVP has inflated the past million.

Then it's time for LeBron's tribute.

"I think what he from a physical standpoint is able to do, just his size, his strength, his speed, again, I think this is just a delight for basketball fans everywhere."

With that, the commissioner opens it up to questions.

LEBRON JAMES HAS a lot on his mind these days. He'd like an audience, not to see him perform or listen to him beef, but to help him think the game aloud.

"He's such a cerebral player," teammate Richard Jefferson says. "When he comes out of the game and sits down between us, he knows he can sit there and talk basketball, talk shop."

The Cavs' bench lineup -- which includes Jefferson and James with Channing Frye, Matthew Dellavedova and Iman Shumpert -- has just ripped off a 17-4 run in the second quarter of the conference finals opener against Toronto. That squad has outscored opponents by 59 points in 71 postseason minutes.

Now James wants to debrief, to exchange impressions. He parks himself in the seat that's left vacant between veterans Jefferson and Frye and begins to play back his mental recording of the game for his trusted council of elders.

"We're just talking the game," Frye says. "When you're inside your own head and can't express what you feel, you start to overthink the game. When you say it, and someone else says yes or no, then you're good. He sees certain things. We're always talking about ball on the bench, about how we can change the game to our advantage."

The Cavs haven't lost a game in more than a month, and James doesn't want to let the game stand still. Not this May. He's too spry, too confident in the health of his team, too convinced that there's nothing anyone in the Eastern Conference can do to stop the Cavs when they're rolling downhill.

That's what he's telling Jefferson and Frye, and they're happy to listen. It's an easy way to reciprocate for the companion ticket to the Finals. In exchange for the pinpoint passes and the wide-open looks, they lend him the same attention as opposing defenses.

"You're letting him vent -- and it might not be venting," Jefferson says. "It might just be analysis. He'll want to tell us what he saw, what's going on. A lot of times, it's what we're going to try to focus on the next time we're in there. Tonight, it was pace. He wanted to impress on us to push the pace because that's what changed the game for us in the second quarter."

Now James is cataloguing how velocity fueled the run and how the unit can double down the next time they take the floor together. More than anything, he just wants to commit thoughts to words, to hang out in the break room for a few minutes and B.S. with a couple of guys who know the business like he does before returning to his desk for the final stretch before halftime.

AT THE PODIUM later that night, it's a charcoal windowpane suit for James, white dress shirt with a cutaway collar, black necktie wider than the current trend. His sartorial style is as multifaceted as his game, but within each fashion classification -- dinner at Barbuto; "I'm a business, man"; street -- he plays it pretty conservatively.

His postgame mood isn't belligerent, but it becomes clear early in his remarks that the 31-point trouncing of Toronto in which the Cavs focused their assault inside was an expression of defiance to those who have pegged his sweet-shooting squad of recent weeks as something so gimmicky as a perimeter-happy, smallball team.

"I keep telling you guys every single day, we're not a jump-shooting team," James says. "You guys kept looking at me crazy about it. We're not a jump-shooting team. We're a balanced team, and whatever the game dictates, we're able to adjust to that."

What am I, Steph? In LeBron's universe, versatility isn't just a quality, it's a virtue. It's why he is the face of your sport. As its avatar, he has a responsibility to master it all, to be a completist. That's what defines value. Yeah he's deserving of MVP for this snapshot in time they call an NBA season; I don't think that word means what you think it means.

"Look at Steph's numbers," he says. "He averaged 30. He led the league in steals. He was 90-50-40, and they won 73. Do you have any debate over that, really, when it comes to that award? But when you talk about most valuable, then you can have a different conversation. So take nothing away from him, he's definitely deserving of that award for this snapshot of time they call a season, for sure."

You can honor the legends and greats, but you should never impersonate your contemporaries or rivals. The Cavs might have snuck a glimpse of Steph's playbook as a hack against lesser opponents, but to be derivative is to be something less than a superstar. Shooting 11-for-12 in the basket area, one attempt outside the paint. Happy now?

Inside-outside, and that's off the court, too -- because a superstar's skill and a superstar's perspective are two different things. A superstar understands how to exert his influence not only on the game, but on the sport. Basketball operations and business operations, because a king reigns over all. It's not just the shoe deal. It's the entire structure of the league. In his middle age as a superstar, LeBron has come to appreciate structure, the firm handles in Miami that he grabbed to win two titles.

When he parks himself at the negotiating table as a union officer, when he tweets in outrage, "So the Kings getting sold for 525M!! And the owners ain't making no money huh? What the hell we have a lo[c]kout for. Get the hell out of here," when he decides that pitching products without a piece of the enterprise is for amateurs, he's taking control.

He can't control his age, can't control every strain of his health, can't control to what extent the game revolves around Curry's best skill, but the force of his value as a superstar? This he can control.

JAMES SITS IN front of his locker in Oracle Arena after the Game 1 loss to the Warriors. As he rips the tangle of cellophane that fastens bags of ice to his knees and back, his high school teammate Brandon Weems, now a Cavaliers scout, stands above him holding the final box score in front of his eyes.

James points at the page.

"Look at Livingston," he says, noting the 20 points the Warriors' backup point guard tallied on a steady wave of mid-range jumpers.

For five minutes, James studies the box score with Talmudic precision. A half hour later, in his postgame news conference, he recites, by rote and without any visual aids, the 45-10 deficit the Cavs bench ran up, and the 25 points they surrendered on 17 turnovers.

As he lifts his feet out of the ice tub and removes the neoprene toe-caps off his feet, he recounts a couple of no-calls to Weems, then demonstrates how he was fouled en route to the basket. Weems nods. In Oakland, it always seems to be less analysis, more venting. There's something about this place and its beloved Steph. He knows idolatry because he has lived it.

With stardom comes mythology, and Steph's has already been enshrined in NBA lore: The scrawny kid who was passed over by the mightier college programs and landed at tiny Davidson; NBA scouts watching his mid-major exploits with a jaundiced eye. Too slight, too much of a defensive liability to play with men. He overcomes all that, and the wonky ankles, to conquer the world.

But don't talk to LeBron about the underdog tag, because all that is circumstantial. He might have been endowed with size, strength and speed as the commissioner noted -- pretty much all he noted, as if James were merely a physical vessel, an NBA body, but not its embodiment -- but what else did he have?

"I'm a statistic that was supposed to go the other way, growing up in the inner city, having a single-parent household," he said prior to Game 1. "It was just me and my mother. So everything I've done has been a success."

It's a refrain we've heard for years -- "just a kid from Akron" -- but now it has power in contrast. The holy trinity of size, strength and speed didn't buy that kid from Akron anything -- not the stability, resources and a front-row seat that come with being a privileged son of the league. A superstar body, even superstar skills, don't give that player a superstar perspective. That only comes when the honeymoon is over, when the fans start to turn against you, when the awards start going to someone else.

Then, and only then, can you revel in personal mythology.

LEBRON JAMES SOUNDS like Jimmy Stewart.

"I-I-I don't know, Doris," James tells ESPN's Doris Burke after polishing off the Raptors. "I've heard all the questions, and that right there is a stumper."

Burke has asked James of what, among all of the achievements, he's most proud. This is genuine emotion, but the most profound quality of the exchange is how LeBron seems almost surprised by the depth of the feeling. This is Mindfulness LeBron who has settled into NBA middle age by exploring his consciousness with a little more finesse, a little less bully-ball.

After he watches his teammates celebrate in the flooded locker room, washed over with tubs of water they've unloaded on one another, he expands.

"And this moment right here, I've been in the league 13 years and I can't continue to not appreciate what I've been able to accomplish, what my guys have been able to accomplish and I guess that's what came over me," he says. "So I just got very emotional about it."

James understands the magnitude of NBA tradition. He sees a superstar's legacy not as a singular accomplishment, but part of a larger anthology of work assembled by the game's luminaries. He cares deeply about the living history of the NBA and wants to leave his imprint on basketball the way a great artist, writer or scientist wants his legacy to outlive his active career.

He knows that the last player to earn six consecutive trips to the NBA Finals was Bill Russell, more than 50 years ago, in a league that had only nine teams, only two playoff rounds -- a league that would have no idea how to accommodate his talents.

But as the glow of an Eastern Conference championship fades, so too does LeBron's newfound awakening. Five days later, he's in the Church of Steph at Oracle Arena, sitting in the very chair in the interview room where Steph receives his nightly tributes.

That enlightenment that overtook him in Toronto?

"I think people are taking it a little further than where it should be," James says. "After we won in Game 6 in Toronto ... that's how I was feeling at that moment. I'm back to my usual self."

You're no longer grateful?

"I'm no longer appreciating what I've been able to do," he says with a laugh, though he's dead serious. Because appreciation is a momentary sensation. A superstar gets hungry again in a few hours.