LOS ANGELES — The NBA on Thursday unveiled what it described as a “marquee Christmas Day matchup” between the Lakers and Warriors, marking the 19th consecutive holiday on which the league has packaged a regular-season game involving LeBron James and Stephen Curry as something fans have not yet, technically, seen.
Promotional materials called the contest “must-watch,” “generational,” and “the rivalry that defines an era,” phrasing the NBA has used continuously since 2009, when both players were already employed by their current teams’ rosters or close enough that nobody can remember the difference.
“This is the one we’ve been waiting for,” said Greer Mancini, a senior broadcast partnerships executive at Hearthline Media, reading from a statement she has issued, with minor edits, every December since the Obama administration. “Two titans. One floor. Christmas Day. You’re going to want to clear your schedule.”
A leaked ESPN graphics package obtained Wednesday revealed that the network had simply re-rendered the 2017 Christmas Day intro at higher resolution, with the words “FATHER TIME” added in the lower third and an additional sparkle effect applied to LeBron’s headband, which has not changed.
The matchup is being marketed as potentially the final Christmas Day meeting between the two future Hall of Famers, a designation the league has also applied to every Lakers-Warriors Christmas game since 2018, including one in which Curry did not play and James was officially listed as questionable with a hangnail.
Asked whether fans should be concerned this is the last chance to witness the rivalry live, an NBA spokesperson said the league “is not yet in a position to confirm that this is the last one,” but expressed confidence that next year’s matchup, already tentatively scheduled, would also be the last one.
Reached at his living room recliner during the third quarter, longtime viewer Mark Drysdale of Cincinnati briefly looked up from his phone to remark that “this is a good one,” a sentence his daughter Jessie confirmed he has said, verbatim, every Christmas afternoon since 2014, sometimes during commercials.
Drysdale’s wife, who has been asking him to help bring the ham to the table since approximately tipoff, said she was “not optimistic” about the ham’s prospects and noted that her husband had also pledged to help during the 2019, 2021, and 2023 Christmas Day broadcasts, none of which featured a ham that arrived warm.
The game itself, which tipped off at 2:37 P.M. Pacific and is expected to conclude sometime before the New Year, featured 14 lead changes, three timeouts called specifically so Charles Barkley could finish a sentence, and one Stephen A. Smith monologue in which the host declared the rivalry “officially over” before clarifying it would resume Tuesday in Phoenix.
At press time, the NBA had announced that next Christmas’s marquee matchup would once again feature the Lakers and the Warriors, pending only the minor formality of both players continuing to be alive.