7:02 pm | December 12, 2018 | Go to Source | Author:
OAKLAND, Calif. — Golden State Warriors superstar Stephen Curry believes that historically great teams in any era should be able to stand on their own merits in the annals of history, but he isn’t going to let anybody think they can beat his Warriors.
After hearing about Shaquille O’Neal’s comments in which he said his Los Angeles Lakers team that won three titles in a row could “easily” beat the Warriors, Curry defended his team’s honor.
“Oh, he’s dead wrong,” Curry told ESPN, with a confident smile, prior to Wednesday’s game against the Toronto Raptors. “Of course. We’d beat them. We can go back-and-forth all day.”
O’Neal told USA Today Sports that his Lakers that won three straight NBA titles between 2000-02 would have no problem beating Curry and the Warriors.
“I think we’d easily win,” O’Neal told USA TODAY Sports. “Other people might feel different, they [the Warriors] might feel different. But we had one of the best teams of all time in 2001 when we went 15-1 in the playoffs. We would’ve gone 16-0 but A.I. went off on us and stepped over Ty Lue.”
The Warriors are trying to become the first team since O’Neal’s Lakers to win three straight NBA championships. The topic of O’Neal’s comments came up when Curry was asked what’s it like for he and his teammates to be compared to the Michael Jordan/Scottie Pippen-led Chicago Bulls teams that won back-to-back-to-back titles on two separate occasions during the ’90s.
As someone who has been around the game his entire life, Curry acknowledged that he finds it “hard” to compare teams from different parts of history.
“For me, I think it’s a tough conversation because I’ve always found it hard to compare eras to each other,” Curry said. “But in terms of having three banners up there and create parallels and comparisons to how they dominated the league through their run to what we’re doing now, I think that speaks a lot on its own. Just in terms of us accomplishing the goal and fulfilling the potential that we have.
“And we’re still in the middle of it so — I laugh sometimes, I saw Shaq today talked about his three-peat championship team would have destroyed us for whatever reason. All those conversations are just entertaining because (1) who knows? (2) the game is so different. Teams that dominated their respective eras need to be left alone in terms of what that means. Hopefully that’s how they’ll approach us when they talk about us 20, 30 years from now looking back.”
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