OAKLAND, Calif. — Stephen Curry says he may need the best game of his life. LeBron James says he is “ready” to pounce at Oracle Arena and give Northeast Ohio what it has craved — an end to Cleveland’s pro sports championship curse.
Game 7 arrives at 8 p.m. Sunday with the Warriors trying to avoid being remembered as the record-setting 73-win team that collapsed famously in The Finals. The Cavaliers are attempting to become the first club ever to rally from a 3-1 Finals deficit to capture the NBA crown while presenting Cleveland its first title since 1964. It likely will be one of the most-watched games in NBA history.
James, the four-time MVP, has severely outplayed Curry through six Finals games, but Warriors reserve Marreese Speights guaranteed the two-time reigning MVP is going to go bananas.
Writing for The Players’ Tribune, Speights said: “Steph’s going off on Sunday. I wouldn’t be surprised if he comes out and scores 50. With all the things the media’s been saying about him … I know he’s going to respond.
“Anytime anything happens with Steph — be it emotionally, or him getting hurt in the Houston series, or him getting ejected on Thursday night — that motivates us to take it to another level. So look out on Sunday.”
Curry says he should have some magic left in his shooting stroke.
“I need to play the game of the year, if not my career, because of what the stakes are,’’ Curry said after Saturday’s practice. “That doesn’t mean scoring 50 points, though. That means controlling the tempo of the game.’’
Entering the playoffs, the pundits talked of Curry as potentially the greatest of all time, but he is shooting just 42 percent, rushing shots and has been sloppy with the ball and on defense.
“Four out of the six games I’ve played pretty well to my expectations, my standards,’’ Curry said. “So I need to take it up another notch for Game 7, and that’s what the greats do.’’
Curry didn’t finish Game 6, ending in dishonor when he fouled out, throwing his mouth piece into the stands and berating the referees after getting ejected.
“I was going to the bench either way, so I might as well have kept walking to the locker room,’’ Curry said. “That’s how I view it in a funny way.’’
There’s nothing funny if the Warriors complete the collapse from being up 3-1 — the turning point potentially being Draymond Green’s suspension for his episode with James toward the end of Game 4, which the Warriors already had wrapped up.
James, seemingly sparked by being called “a b—h” by Green, has responded with back-to-back 41-point games and now plays perhaps the most pressure-packed game of his career.
“I guess in laymen’s terms it’s pressure,” James said. “I look at it as an opportunity to do something special.”
James said he will live with the outcome as long as he is “true to the game.’’ But he emphasized he takes the court for the city of Cleveland on Sunday.
“One thing we all know is, it’s the last game of the season, so it’s not like you’re preserving any energy,’’ said James, triumphant in the last Finals’ Game 7, when the Heat beat the Spurs in 2013. “I live with the results. One thing I can’t live with is if I don’t go out and give everything I had to the game and not be true to the game. That would stop me from sleeping. I’m ready to go.
“I came back for a reason, and that is to bring a championship to the city of Cleveland, to northeast Ohio and all of Ohio and all Cavaliers fans in the world. That’s been one of my goals. But I don’t add too much pressure on it. I go out and trust what I’ve been able to do, the work I’ve put into it, my teammates have put into it.’’
Golden State’s Klay Thompson said after the Game 6 disaster in Cleveland that failing to win the title would mean the season was a “100 percent” failure. Warriors coach Steve Kerr called Thompson’s assertion “insane,” but Curry didn’t disagree with his fellow Splash Brother.
“Pretty much,’’ Curry said. “That was our goal from the beginning. We’re here on Game 7 with a chance to do it. We’ve had two chances already. If we come up short, we’ll all be very, very disappointed. No two ways around it.’’
Warriors assistant coach Ron Adams admitted the clubs hasn’t looked like the 73-win, free-flowing juggernaut.
“We haven’t played that game for a while, especially the last two games,’’ Adams said.
Curry knows the Warriors have one last chance to recapture past glitter or face an endless summer of misery.
“We look at ourselves on film, the kind of spark, you just don’t see that rhythm and that flow and just the energy we play with the offense,’’ Curry said. “I don’t know why we haven’t been ourselves. [But] if we’re standing on a podium tomorrow who cares how we got there? We got there.’’