Warriors star and NBA MVP candidate Steph Curry put on a show in his team's play-in series game against the Los Angeles Lakers on Wednesday night, but it was LeBron James who drained a Curry-style deep 3-pointer late in the fourth quarter for the go-ahead bucket.
James' long heave deep into the shot clock with inside of a minute remaining in regulation put the Lakers up 103-100, the final margin, in a tightly contested affair pitting two of the sport's brightest stars against each other unusually early in the NBA playoff calendar.
The shot came moments after James appeared to get poked in the eye while absorbing a hard foul from the Warriors' Draymond Green on his way to the rim. The game was paused for several minutes while James was treated, and the play reviewed.
During a postgame interview, LeBron joked that he was seeing "three rims" on his fateful shot, aimed for "the middle one," and was thankful to have made it.
Curry led all scorers with 37 points, including 6-of-9 from deep, capping what has been inarguably one of his finest seasons at age 33 while leading a Warriors team in transition to the newly formed play-in series. He turned the ball over six times, though, and Andrew Wiggins was his only Warriors teammate to record more than 10 points, with 21.
The Warriors' final possession came with only a few seconds remaining in the game, and was disrupted when the Lakers' defense broke up an inbounds pass intended for Curry, thwarting a potential attempt for a game-tying 3-pointer.
With the win, the reigning champion Lakers clinched the seventh seed in the Western Conference playoffs. The Warriors will next take on the San Antonio Spurs for the eighth seed.
