Leave it to LeBron James to compare Stephen Curry to Shohei Ohtani and somehow make perfect sense.

In the latest conversation, LeBron walked through exactly why Curry scrambles defensive schemes the way Ohtani breaks baseball’s logic. He joked about a group chat with his “computer friends,” where someone said: imagine getting a text that a guy struck out 10 batters in the NLCS… and another text saying a guy hit three homers in the same game… and then finding out it’s the same dude. That’s Ohtani. And in hoops? That’s what LeBron thinks Steph is doing to defenses every night.

When LeBron talks about “LeBron and Steph” now, it’s not just rivalry. It’s a basketball historian trying to explain a glitch in the sport’s code.

This isn’t new admiration. Back in 2016, right before the Finals, LeBron already called the Warriors a “well-oiled machine” and said, “Klay and Steph are probably the two greatest shooters that we’ve probably ever seen… better offense beats great defense any day.”

That was before Curry even finished rewriting the math of the sport. Since then, Curry has piled up receipts: a unanimous MVP, a 73–9 season, and that absurd 2015–16 run with 402 made threes on 45.4% from deep.

Fast-forward to this new clip, and you can feel LeBron leveling up the praise. He tells Steph he still thinks “every time you shoot the ball, I think it’s going in.” That’s not fan talk, that’s a guy who’s game-planned against him in June saying, yeah, this is not normal.

By the end, LeBron lands here: Curry is “the greatest shooter of all time and one of the greatest threats in NBA history.” Coming from him? That’s basically a Hall of Fame plaque draft.

The Ohtani comparison is where it really gets fun.

Shohei Ohtani isn’t just an MVP he’s a three-time AL/NL MVP who’s put up seasons with 40+ homers while also posting ace-level pitching numbers, and in 2024 he casually went 54 homers and 59 steals while still being a Cy Young-caliber arm when healthy. He’s a walking cheat code: the best hitter and one of the best pitchers on the same roster… in the same person.

LeBron’s point: if you watched that hypothetical NLCS game, 10 Ks and three bombs, you’d assume two historic performances. Finding out it’s the same guy breaks your brain.

Curry does that to defenses. Coaches scheme for the pull-up assassin, then find out the off-ball version is a whole second superstar hiding inside the same jersey.

Curry as Basketball’s Two-Way Unicorn… All on Offense

Here’s where the “LeBron and Steph” conversation lines up perfectly with the analytics.

Curry isn’t just a good shooter. He’s a statistical singularity:

• Career 42.3% from three on ~9.4 attempts per game, something nobody else has touched even for a single season at that combo of volume and efficiency.

• Effective range out to around 27 feet at roughly 40% he’s taking and making what used to be “heat check” nonsense as part of the regular menu.

• In 2015–16, he shot 43.8% on pull-up threes, the highest ever since tracking began.

Now plug that into what LeBron described:

• Semi-transition? If your pickup point is too low: bang.

• High pick-and-roll and your big isn’t up to touch: bang.

• You finally survive the action? He happily gets off the ball and becomes a blur through screens, and the possession is still a problem.

LeBron nails a subtle point most stars never admit: a lot of guys hate giving up control. Steph is the rare superstar who’s equally terrifying with and without the ball, and totally comfortable handing the joystick to the system.

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The numbers back up everything LeBron’s instinct is screaming.

Breakdown shows Curry running over 1,000 off-ball screen actions in a season while producing 1.276 points per possession on those plays, yet only touching the ball on about two-thirds of them. That’s wild: he’s bending the defense so badly that even possessions where he doesn’t end up with the ball become elite offense.

That’s why analysts call him maybe the most valuable screener per screen in NBA history, not because he’s Shaq in the paint, but because defenders panic at the idea of losing him for half a second.

And when he sits, the whole architecture wobbles. One postseason sample had the Warriors’ offensive rating dropping 22 points per 100 possessions with Curry off the floor. Team three-point percentage dips from 38.6% to 35.8% without him. Klay Thompson alone jumps from 38.7% to 44.5% from deep when he shares the floor with Steph, with a net rating swing of almost 20 points.

That’s not “good teammate” energy. That’s black-swan, changed-the-sport stuff the “from Bluetooth to Wi-Fi” leap your text talks about. He didn’t just master the three; he made the entire league redesign its playbook around it.

What LeBron just did on camera is essentially translate all those VORP and RAPTOR charts into locker-room language.

Data has Curry sitting around 75+ career VORP, ahead of icons like Hakeem and Kidd, and posting a +11.1 Offensive RAPTOR in 2016, the top offensive season of the modern tracking era, with a playoff spike even higher. He’s the offensive engine that proves you can be a relatively average defender and still end up historically valuable because your spacing, shooting, and gravity break the scoreboard.

LeBron doesn’t say “Offensive RAPTOR,” but he describes it perfectly.

He talks about:

• The fear Curry generates (“for the fear of the opponent”).

• The energy he creates just by moving.

• The way he’s happy to “lose control” of the possession, knowing the ball will “find” him again because the system orbits his gravity.

When the face of this era looks at Steph and basically says, this is basketball’s Ohtani one dude doing the job of two superstars, it hits different. It’s not just flattering a rival. It’s LeBron James confirming what the numbers have been screaming for a decade:

In the story of LeBron and Steph, the wild twist is that the guy once trying to solve Curry in June is now the one giving us the clearest explanation of why nobody ever really did.