We are all witnesses: the grand finale of Steph Curry and LeBron James was worth gold

1. Dozens of celebrities sat on the lines in the hall in Barsi on Saturday night. NBA, soccer and WNBA legends and Olympic legends, movie and TV stars and music. Honestly, we wouldn’t expect anything else from them. But at some point, in the last quarter, they were joined by a few other names that we least expected to see, and shared with them the same amazement, the same fascination, the same almost childlike enthusiasm. There was Joel Embiid, MVP a year ago, and Jayson Tatum, who just two months ago won a championship, and other stars who are earning in the region of 40 million dollars this season, and everyone, like the last television viewer, turned into 8-year-old fans for a few minutes.

When LeBron flexed his muscles after a big basket in the first half, everyone on the bench did it with him. With every basket in the last quarter, they jumped in the air. When Durant celebrated his own basket, they imitated his movements. When Steph did the “Nighty Night” after his 17th 3-pointer in the two playoffs, they did it with him. They looked like groupies, as they realized the magnitude of the moment. They realized that they were witnessing a wonderful game, a sequel to the superhero festival from the semi-finals, an evening that we doubt we will see again in our lifetime.

On the face of it, a French team whose most significant players tonight were a 20-year-old guy (Wambanyama) who has never participated in an NBA playoff game, a 37-year-old center who barely got opportunities in the tournament (De Colo), and a player (Yavosela) who was given up in the NBA five years ago and became a Euroleague monster , was not supposed to match the most star-studded team the U.S. has sent to any tournament since 2008, maybe since 1996. But in a shorter game, with home rules, with the support of a full house, with fire in their eyes, they rose to the challenge. The Americans to the limit of their ability. They forced the greatest shooter of all time to give a shooting display that cannot be imitated, including a three-pointer over the outstretched hands of Simon Bales. Only then, the Americans placed the flag in the highest place on the podium.

As high as possible (Xavier Laine/Getty Images)

Be legendary. And this time as a supporting actor

2. At the end of July 2021, Devin Booker and Jaro Holiday boarded a private plane together to land in Tokyo. The two, along with Kris Middleton, Holiday’s teammate at the time, shared one of the craziest flights you could ask for. Due to the constraints of the corona virus that postponed the season and the identity of the participants in the final series, it turned out that a quarter of the American squad for the Olympic Games held in 2021 were players from Milwaukee and Phoenix. They left the US as rivals who smelled each other’s sweat up close for two weeks, arrived in Tokyo as teammates, and helped Durant beat France in the final.

Holiday, both then and in last night’s final (especially in the second half), has established himself as the secret ingredient of any squad he is on. He is one of only two players to have won two NBA championships since the start of the decade, and no one will be dethroned if he finishes 2025 with 3 championship rings and 2 Olympic gold medals. In Paris 2024, an amusing and unexpected thing happened: it seems that Devin Booker, a scorer with supreme grace, understood what needs to be done to be Jaro Holiday. And all this with a little inspiration from above.

In the tournament that ended on 10.8.24, Kobe Bryant’s three books in the NBA and the American team, Booker took Kobe’s advice, Be legendary, to the next level. Kobe himself, after years in which he made himself hated and rejected, returned himself to the heart of the consensus of the American public through tremendous performances in the national team uniform. Even from the qualifying tournament (the Americans had to go through one because they only took bronze in Athens, and lost in the World Championship) and in Beijing 2008, Kobe became the elimination unit of the American squad, the man who is placed on the opposing team’s best guard, the one who doesn’t force shots even though he can, The one who gives what the group needs.

Booker in this tournament was the X factor for the Americans. When defenses focused on the next generation superstars, he moved well without the ball, on the three-point arc and cutting into the paint. He put a body on the opposing stars, fought through blocks, did the box-out and collected garbage balls from the floor, committed fouls so that the stars next to him would not get involved, and scored the tremendous three-pointer that paved the way to complete the comeback against Serbia. In the semifinals and finals, only Steph Curry had a higher plus/minus than him. The USA was plus 34 in 51 minutes with him, and minus 19 in 29 minutes without him.

Compared to him and Anthony Davis, who barely got practice but did a glorious dirty job in Paris, another player who grew up as a fan of Kobe, Jayson Tatum, was much less legendary in this tournament. Unlike Booker, unlike even Durant in the last quarter against Serbia, he does not know how to play basketball where he is not one of the two main options in the attack. He did not find himself when the ball was not in his hand, he often got lost defensively. He’s a great player, probably top 10 in the league, and one could argue that he should have gotten more minutes – the legendary Bob Cousy was furious with Kerr and claimed he was anti-Celtics, because he didn’t put “a player who appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated this summer” in the semifinals – but the bottom line, He is the only one who has not acclimatized to the position that the US team captains have chosen for him.

X Factor (Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

Trip without ego

3 You can criticize Steve Kerr as much as you want. His role in the last month is forced to be the best in the world today. He’s making a good living, he’s settled in life, and still anything but gold would have caused the FBI to stop him at border control on the way back. On the face of it, he had it all. All the stars wanted to come. A boy in a candy store. Fantasy player without limitations. But it just sounds simple. He had to take aging stars who in recent seasons have already suffered quite a few injuries, and did not play in the summer, and especially did not play together, and form a team around them. For 24 years now, since Lithuania and the young Sharas made the Americans rattle in Sydney, we see that an excess of talent does not guarantee gold, and if it is not enough, then the world is reducing gaps and stopped being afraid. This time the situation was no different.

Kerr, on the whole, managed the American staff very well. He didn’t have to be a kindergartner, he had to put together the best ensembles. The lineup of substitutes in the beginning with the duo AD-Bayo, the duo Dur+Ant and Derrick White was an elimination unit designed to give a fireblow against the opposition substitutes, and when he had to change, he changed. Forbes calculated that the 12 players have earned $2.5 billion so far in their careers (and that includes Tyrese Halliburton and Anthony Edwards, who just finished their Rockies contracts). This means that at any given moment he had something like between 600 million and a billion dollars on the bench. Piles of ego, with tens of millions of followers and swarms of fans and journalists who will search for anything with tweezers, people just waiting to be offended. And yet, there doesn’t seem to be any ego problem in this team.

It was also the most methodical American team seen in years: Kerr used the arrival of Steph and Durant to try and recreate Golden State’s offense, with LeBron as the all-seeing engine and Boyer as Klay Thompson, and it worked great against lesser opponents, too. When Kerry didn’t hurt anything. Only in the last quarter against Serbia did he realize that it was no longer working that evening, that the Serbians had found the kryptonite, and when he had to improvise, he gave the ball to Steph and Baron and told them: there is no style, dance. So they danced. Kerr, like his great assistants Ty Lue and Erik Spoelstra, was never a man of ego.

LeBron, the first to enlist in the national mission, was also the one who made sure that everyone felt comfortable in it. He finished the Olympic tournament with 8.5 assists per game, including 9.7 in the deciding stages. He was there for everyone, probably competing for the last title of his life and demanding the same level of commitment from everyone. The American team has developed a complete dependence on him in the deciding stages, quite amazing considering that he is in his 22nd season, 39 years old, and that this is the most talented staff that has been and will be by his side. This is LeBron’s greatness and this is LeBron’s curse: next to him, whether he likes it or not, almost every player is forced to step down. But not this time. Because only two players have actually looked him in the eye year after year in the last 15 years, and both of them were there this time by his side. And of them only one played against him in 4 consecutive final series. To that player, Wardell Stephen Curry, LeBron handed a ball behind his back in a critical attack of the Finals, and Curry knew exactly what to do with him.

This was the real magic in this American team: on the soil of Paris, they brought up three musketeers who are now among the 15 greatest players to ever bounce an orange ball. And as in Alexandre Dumas’s book, almost 400 years after Dartanian, they carried the motto together: one for all, all for one.