The Bay Area is the ideal location to take in the sun setting on legends. After all, for LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Stephen Curry, it was the site of many of their brightest moments, as they battled with and against each other for NBA supremacy for so many years.

Not that anyone is trying to rush them from the stage right now. Quite the contrary. Try to find anyone who wants to see three of this or any era’s all-time greats step away from the spotlight. Or even try to make the argument that they should, given that they remain among the best players in the league well into their second decade or — in James’ case — third. The NBA’s most accomplished active trio will be in the middle of everything at All-Star weekend in San Francisco. It’s not a farewell, but it’s certainly an opportunity to reflect. In basketball terms, the threesome is raging against the dying light more determinedly and effectively than almost anyone before them.

James is in his 22nd NBA season and playing better than any 40-year-old has ever played basketball. Durant is 36 and is nearly as dominant in his 17th season as he was in almost any that came before. Curry is 36 and in his 16th year, and still the most dangerous three-point shooter in the game. But all good things — even nearly unprecedently great things — eventually have to come to an end. Exactly when that might be remains a guess at best. All of them remain under contract. All of them remain elite. All of them remain committed to their craft. But time remains undefeated and it’s better to celebrate the league’s most influential trio while we still can.

There are myriad ways to contextualize the significance of James and his peers’ impact on the NBA, but first, a little economics lesson: When James was playing high school basketball for St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in Akron, Ohio, the NBA was in a vastly different place than it is now. Not that the league was suffering — the Larry Bird and Magic Johnson 80s, the Michael Jordan 90s and the stewardship of late NBA commissioner David Stern had long before placed the league on a growth curve it’s still enjoying today — but it wasn’t quite the fire-breathing money factory it seems to be now. In 2002, the last year that the NBA didn’t have LeBron James in it, the league was still adjusting to a post-Jordan future. Television ratings were off from their peak, the Shaq-Kobe Lakers mini-dynasty was splintering. And the game was at times tough to watch. When the San Antonio Spurs won the 2003 title over the New Jersey Nets, the average score was 88-82 for the six-game series. The Spurs scored 101 points in Game 1 and didn’t crack 100 again, and the Nets never did, even with Hall-of-Fame point guard Jason Kidd pushing the pace. In Game 4, the final score was 77-76. 

Those aren’t the only reasons the financial picture was so much different then, but it all played a part. In the last season before James was drafted in the summer of 2003, the NBA salary cap was $40.27 million. That’s it. That’s the pool from which an entire NBA roster was to be paid (unless teams went over the cap and paid the luxury tax and all of that). An entire team, in other words, earned less than the $40.5 million Sacramento Kings centre Domantas Sabonis is earning for the 2024-25 season. This season, the salary cap is $140.6 million. Adjusted for inflation that $40.2 million is $69 million today, meaning that in real dollars NBA player salaries have more than doubled in the span of James’ career. And the best is yet to come if you’re in the business of being an NBA superstar. Let’s say Durant plays until his 22nd season, which would be in 2030-31. Sure, it seems unlikely, but so is putting up 27.3 points, six rebounds and 4.2 assists with a True Shooting percentage of 63.8 (which is better than his preposterous career average of 62 per cent) as Durant is in season 17. Anyway, if Durant keeps it rolling until 2030-31 when he’ll be 41, the NBA salary cap projects to be $249.1 million, or more than a six-fold increase since the LeBron era kicked off. That type of growth has been made possible by the league’s new media rights deal, which kicks in next year and will pay the NBA $76 billion over the next 11 seasons. There are a lot of big-picture reasons why media companies want to invest that much money in the NBA in the near future, especially in an environment where the delivery of content seems to be shifting by the minute. But perhaps the overwhelming reason is that the NBA delivers star power to a global audience as reliably as movie franchises based on comic book heroes, and for going on two full decades, James, Durant and Curry have been the league’s biggest characters. 

“Guys in this league owe a great deal to these guys,” said Garrett Temple, the longtime member of the NBPA executive committee who has carved out a 15-year career with earnings of $53 million as a respected journeyman in the “big three” era. “They helped the game go global, because of what they’ve been able to do. Obviously, a lot of credit goes to the late David Stern, to NBA commissioner Adam Silver and them promoting it globally. But what these stars have been able to do is carry themselves well and show a tremendous passion for basketball and so people all over the world fall in love with them. At the end of the day, they’ve left the game in a better place.”

Of course, they’re still in the game. And while All-Star weekend is decidedly less about competition and more about pomp and circumstance, perhaps the most amazing quality of the James-Durant-Curry era is that they can still absolutely bring it. They are all doing it this season and are at the All-Star Game entirely on merit. I referenced Durant’s numbers above, but James arrived in San Francisco averaging 24.3 points, 7.7 rebounds and 9.0 assists with an effective field goal percentage of 57.8, which is better than he had in three of his four MVP seasons. Curry is holding up his end too: Even in a down year on an injury-riddled team with little in the way of offensive help — until the Warriors added Jimmy Butler (another bag of bones who can still do it at age 35) at the trade deadline — Curry is averaging 23.4 points, 6.1 assists and 4.5 rebounds and has a chance to make 300 threes in a season for the sixth time. For context, only two other players have ever made 300 triples in a single season — James Harden and Klay Thompson — and neither of them have done it more than once. Numbers aside, in case the world needed a reminder of what the old guys can do when the stakes are highest, the 2024 Olympic tournament will be the forever moment for their shared dominance.

Over two epic medal-round games — a razor-thin semi-final win by Team USA over Serbia and then the home team, France, in the gold-medal game in Paris — the best basketball in the world was being played by three guys whose careers almost pre-date the iPhone. That it happened in what is likely the most competitive international tournament ever — Serbia (Nikola Jokic), Greece (Giannis Antetokounmpo), Canada (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander) and France (Victor Wembanyama) were all anchored by past or future NBA MVPs — is even more fitting.

“I hope that the legacy of this team is to see these superstar players and the emotion and how much it matters to [them] to win,” Team USA head coach Steve Kerr said to a small group of reporters after the gold-medal game. “And then hopefully the stories will be out there of how hard Kevin Durant works every day, and … LeBron and Steph and all these guys. And that’s the key. We’ve got a lot of talent in this country, that all the young players watching this need to know how hard it is to win, how much goes into it.”

Let’s start there. The NBA’s three biggest stars are each almost weirdly gifted. There’s no denying that. This is not exactly a story of underdogs overcoming impossible adversity with their grit alone. The NBA doesn’t work that way. Supreme talent is the entry fee. Even now, more than two decades after he averaged 20.9 points, 5.5 rebounds and 5.9 assists as a 19-year-old straight out of high school, watching James around other NBA players is a little mind-bending.

He remains enormous for a forward and looks comfortable against most of the league’s centres, all while moving like a shooting guard 15 years younger. And even with all the advantages you get with being six-foot-nine and 260 pounds (he’s listed at 250 pounds, but no one believes that), James has famously invested in his health and physical fitness to an almost unprecedented degree. There are numbers that get floated around. Back in 2016, Bill Simmons of The Ringer said that Maverick Carter, James’ long-time business partner, told him (Simmons) that James spent $1.5 million on his body — splashing out on everything from personal chefs to NBA-level workout facilities in his homes to cryotherapy chambers, multiple personal trainers and other treatment professionals. It’s possible that number is double now. The investment has more than paid off, given that James became the first active NBA player to become a billionaire, as calculated by Forbes back in 2022. 

And what of Durant? He’s six-foot-11 but may actually be seven feet tall. And ever since he was drafted No. 2 overall in 2007 after one season at the University of Texas he’s been some version of what he is now: A silky shooter and brilliant ball-handler, the combination of which no one had seen in the NBA at his size before he arrived. And then he continued to get better: In 2009-10, Durant led the NBA in scoring — the first of four times he’s done it — and shot 50.6 per cent from two-point range and 36.5 per cent from three with a True Shooting percentage of 60.7. In any context, it was an impressive display of efficiency for a high-volume scorer, particularly for a 21-year-old in his third season.

But jump ahead a decade and consider these numbers from Durant’s age 32-35 seasons: Even though injuries limited him to just 212 games over four seasons, somehow Durant was a better and more efficient scorer at that stage of his career than he was when he was runner up for MVP and won his first scoring title with the Oklahoma City Thunder. It’s kind of astounding. In his early 30s and battling injuries every season, Durant averaged 28.2 points a game while shooting 58 per cent on twos and 40.9 per cent on threes with a TS percentage of 64.6. 

And then there’s Curry. It’s easy to make him the plucky one because he’s relatively average by way of size in that he’s six-foot-three, but he’s miles from the skinny kid at Davidson who lit up March Madness. To see Curry up close at age 36 is to see an athlete who has sculpted himself, carefully adding layers of muscle over time. The ankle problems that threatened his career over his first three professional seasons were solved with surgery and a diligent rehabilitation process that Curry maintains to this day. From 2012-13 to 2016-17 Curry was All-NBA four times, MVP twice, NBA champion twice and played in four Finals while playing in 96 per cent of 491 games, regular season and playoffs. All while developing himself into the greatest shooter that’s ever played the sport: There are only four players in NBA history to make at least 1,000 threes and shot better than 42 per cent for their careers and none have done so while shooting more than five threes per game.

Curry has done it while shooting more than nine threes per game. Curry has averaged nearly four made threes per game for his career, the next closest is Damian Lillard, with 3.1. No one shoots it like Curry, but his prowess has inspired a new way to play the game and a new generation of players who have shaped their talents in Curry’s mould.

“The game has changed based on those three guys,” said Houston Rockets forward Jeff Green — who broke into the NBA with Durant in 2007 with the Seattle SuperSonics and went to the Finals with James and Cleveland in 2018 where they lost to Durant, Curry and the Warriors. “Steph being the best shooter of all time, and the other two guys being — LeBron’s what? Six-eight, six-nine, and whatever KD wants to be, but seven-foot — being able to do everything possible on the court, having the IQ that all three have, they all revolutionized the game: How you have to play it, the way you work at it, the longevity, the professionalism. Every one of those three guys is all of that … I mean, that’s years and years and years of hard work … You don’t get to become the NBA’s best shooter of all time by mistake. You don’t play as long as LeBron and KD have by accident. You know the hard work that they’ve put in. You see it. And you know that’s why they are who they are.”

Accordingly, the milestones and honours are piling up. Between them, they share 10 NBA titles, seven Finals MVP awards, seven regular-season MVPs, 19 Finals appearances, 47 All-Star Games and nine Olympic gold medals. They keep setting the bar at new and seemingly impossible heights. Consider:

• Already the all-time scoring leader, if James scores this season and next — his last under contract, though he’s expected to sign an extension with the Lakers this summer — at the rate he has the previous three seasons, James should eclipse 44,000 points. That would leave him nearly 5,000 points ahead of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, whose once seemingly unbreakable record James surpassed in 2023-24. Just for fun, let’s presume James stops there, that he has one more excellent season after this one and packs it in while still near the peak of his powers. In that scenario, Durant — who became just the eighth player in NBA history to score 30,000 points earlier this week — would have to play at least seven more seasons to catch James. And that assumes Durant averages 27 points a game and plays 62 games each of those seasons, which he is on pace to do this year, but has only done once in the past seven seasons. Or how about James’ new teammate, 25-year-old Luka Doncic? The Slovenian star would have to average more than 28 points a game and play at least 67 games a season until 2041-42 when he’ll be turning 43, or three years older than James is now. 

• And here’s the thing about Durant: He’s second in active scoring (to James) and eighth all-time even while having had four seasons where he’s played less than 50 games due to injury, including missing all of the 2019-20 season. He’s the only player in NBA history to have averaged 27 points a game for his career with a TS percentage of 62.0 or better. No wonder his peers consider him the most lethal scorer to have ever played: It’s a combination of being a three-level scorer and the efficiency that he has had his whole career. “I know we’re both kind of obsessed with the 50/40/90 pursuit — and he got it one year (in Golden State),” Curry told ESPN recently as Durant was closing in on 30,000 points. “But the way he does it is totally different than the way I do it. Just the fact that he’s such a graceful, efficient scorer no matter what defence you really throw at him, to do it for that many years is really impressive. So there’s a reason people talk about him as the greatest legitimate scorer ever.”

• And Curry? Every three-pointer he makes pushes his record for total threes even further out of reach. The Warriors sharpshooter is under contract for two more years after this one and if he makes 250 threes a season next year and the year after — he’s on pace for 291 this year — he’ll top 4,500 triples. Harden, his closest active pursuer, would need to make nearly 200 threes a season — or just above his career average of 196 a year — for eight more seasons, which seems unlikely given the Los Angeles Clippers guard is 35 and in his 16th season. Trae Young is one of the prolific-shooting young generation of guards who have styled their games after Curry, but he’s only averaged 176.5 made threes through his first six seasons. At that pace, he’d have to play 26 years to catch Curry if he gets to 4,500. Or how about single-season excellence? Curry is the only player in NBA history to make 400 threes in a season — he made 402 in 2016-17, his second MVP season. The next best single-season total belongs to Harden, who had 378 in 2018-19 but has otherwise never cracked 300. This year, Anthony Edwards is putting together one of the greatest non-Curry three-point seasons ever. So far, the Timberwolves superstar is just one of just three players in league history — joining Curry and former Splash Brother Klay Thompson — to average at least four made threes a game and shoot better than 40 per cent on them, and as he’s on pace for just 323 threes this season. That total would be the seventh most of all time behind Harden’s outlier year and five more of Curry’s best. Edwards is just 23 so you can’t rule it out, he’ll take a run at it, but how far short he’ll likely fall with a career year this season illustrates just how tall a mountain 400 threes in a single season is. 

The “too long, didn’t read” version: James, Durant and Curry have a list of individual and team accomplishments that won’t soon be replicated, if ever. 

So what happens when they inevitably step aside? It’s the NBA’s multi-billion-dollar question. The league’s solution to breaking out of the post-Jordan doldrums in the early 2000s was to embrace rule changes that opened up the game and set the course to the “pace-and-space” era that has driven scoring and offensive efficiency to new heights. Since James’ rookie season, the league’s average points per 100 possessions has increased from 102.9, the lowest of the three-point era, to 115.3 last season, an all-time high as was the 26.7 assists per game. There are questions if the league’s embrace of the three-point shot has gone too far, with teams averaging a record 37.5 triples a game — a 67 per cent increase compared to the 22.4 threes per game teams were averaging a decade ago when Curry led the Warriors to their first title.

The NBA is embracing international basketball like never before, with the league aggressively looking into creating a league in Europe under the NBA brand and making significant investments in Africa. Aligning itself with global media titans like Amazon can’t hurt. But chances are the NBA will secure its post-James-Durant-Curry future the same way it elevated itself once Jordan retired: New generations of stars will come along doing things that seemed unfathomable until they were done. Spurs big man Wembanyama is showing signs that he can reshape the game with his prodigious gifts. Three-time MVP Jokic is putting together a statistical resume that will be unique across basketball as he melds the perimeter skills of an elite point guard with a dominant paint presence. Gilgeous-Alexander is putting up season averages last achieved by Jordan, and Edwards has drawn his share of Jordan comparisons too, for his ferocious athleticism. There are others.

“The league is in a different place now (than in the post-Jordan era),” said New Orleans Pelicans guard CJ McCollum, a 12-year veteran and another member of the NBPA executive committee. “And obviously you’ve got a lot of young stars. Giannis (Antetokounmpo) is still only 30, right? There’s Jayson Tatum, Luka, ANT (Anthony Edwards), Ja (Morant), Wemby, Shai. There’s a lot of players who are — obviously not at that level, but they have potential to be faces of the league, stars, win multiple championships, win multiple MVPs, be global figures. I think we’re in a really good place, but I think we have to just appreciate LeBron, KD and Steph while they’re here.”