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Are You a Lebron or a Curry?

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NavyBuckeye91's picture
June 3, 2016 at 9:14am
161 Comments

Interesting article in the WSJ about what your NBA favorite says about you. 

But who is better, Curry or James, is the NBA’s great unknown. What is known is why you might prefer one over the other. The idea comes from a field of psychological research that, in recent years, has begun to reveal the underlying reasons you adore Curry and appreciate James. It might be the most useful way to understand talent in the NBA today.

James is a basketball natural. ...But the truly crazy thing about James’s career is that all that hype wasn’t wrong. James, the four-time NBA Most Valuable Player and two-time NBA champion, is as close to a sure thing as anyone in sports. He goes to the NBA Finals the way most people go to the dentist.

Curry is not the natural that has become the norm in the NBA. He is what psychologists would call a striver...That may be the reason that even now, after a year that could end with Curry winning back-to-back MVP awards and beating James for back-to-back titles, there are many around basketball who firmly believe James is the superior player. Curry had the better season, they say, but James at his best is better.

But there’s another explanation for why James is untouchable in the minds of many basketball fans: People say they like strivers, but secretly they prefer naturals.

But basketball also proves a corollary to the natural bias: The striver is more popular than the natural.

In simplest terms, humans have an innate bias that evaluates the naturally gifted as being the better performer, but we have a tendency to like the striver better than the natural.

Personally, I don't think anyone can definitively make a case for who is better between Lebron and Steph, because they are such different players. I will say this: an analysis of the 2015 Finals shows that LBJ carried six grown men on his back for six games last year.  It will be interesting to see how the rest of this series plays out.

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