The chosen turf for this anticipated basketball showdown featuring the Kia MVP and the consensus Best Player In The Game will be Cleveland and Oakland, a Finals series made possible by the very unlikely basketball incubator of Akron, Ohio.

It's common knowledge by now how Cavaliers star LeBron James put his hometown on the map. He reminds us of his bleeding love for Akron without being asked anymore. But the link between Akron and Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry is less apparent and celebrated, and never would've happened if not for a series of quirky events that led him there.

"When you think about two players from the same place," said Dell Curry, Steph's father, "it's one of those strange things in life that you couldn't even imagine."

Two of the game's most watchable players, on a first-name basis with the basketball public, hailing from the same hospital, with a combined 5 MVPs are now ready to wrestle over the Larry O'Brien Trophy? How unlikely is that?

As we ready for The 2015 NBA Finals, Akron will be a centerpiece because of one star who never really left, and another whose time in town was best measured by a stopwatch.

You could say Curry is from Akron the way Michael Jordan is from Brooklyn. And you'd be correct, since both players were born in those respective places ... and both quickly relocated to North Carolina. Curry is a Charlotte kid -- that's where he learned the game, watched his father play professionally, attended college and calls home.

Akron, though, was his home for the first five months of his life and remains officially emblazoned on his birth certificate. The journey that played a role in his first breaths -- two weeks prematurely, we might add -- include an trade involving Dell Curry, an Earth, Wind and Fire concert, a hysterical driver who was given the wrong directions and an absentee father stuck in New York.

Early transition game for Currys

This Steph Curry/Akron connection began several years earlier, at Virginia Tech, where the star men's basketball player found himself attending lots of women volleyball games.

Dell Curry was a junior and became fixated on a freshman setter named Sonya. The two quickly became inseparable and were a model campus couple, both attractive, athletically talented (Sonya won state championships in basketball and volleyball) and refreshingly down to earth despite their status.

When Curry was drafted by the Utah Jazz with the 15th pick in the 1986 Draft, he didn't leave her behind and embark on the nightlife trail, as many young professional athletes do. Dell and Sonya were married two years later and began making plans.

The Jazz spoke highly of Curry when they drafted him, raving about his feathery shooting touch with the textbook fingertip release ... and then they shipped him (and Kent Benson) to Cleveland before the 1987-88 season. The Jazz already had Bobby Hansen and Darrell Griffith at shooting guards and needed frontcourt size. Utah got its wish in the trade, landing center Mel Turpin, who soon became overweight and was out of the league by late 1990.

Meanwhile in Cleveland, the Cavs welcomed their new guard with the same glowing reviews Curry heard from the Jazz a year earlier. Cleveland's general manager at the time, Wayne Embry, said the Cavs even wanted to re-tool the team's offense with Curry in mind.

"We wanted him for his shooting," Embry said in a phone interview. "Not many players could release the ball as quickly as he did. We thought he would fit right in with the team we had, with Brad Daugherty, Mark Price and the others. We made an all-out effort to get him. The trade was finally done late at night. Took all day. Was worth it."

Curry came off the bench and played behind Craig Ehlo and Ron Harper and gave the Cavs exactly what they wanted. He was second-best 3-point shooter (behind Price), making 34.6 percent of his shots from there in 19 minutes a game, rare that a 23-year-old would get that much burn on a Lenny Wilkens-coached team. Curry's basketball career was about to turn and so was his personal life: in training camp that year, he learned Sonya was expecting their first child.

Back then, the Cavaliers played at the Richfield Coliseum, a soulless building tucked in the woods and wedged between Cleveland and Akron, making it one of the more isolated arenas in the NBA. Because of its location, few players lived in Cleveland, roughly 30 miles away. As a young couple careful with their money, the Currys bunkered in a two-bedroom at the Timber Top Apartments in Akron that today goes for $605 a month -- a total that includes heat and hot water.

"At the time, I was thinking I'd probably be in Cleveland at least for a little while," Curry said. "We had a developing team and were starting to win. Craig Ehlo, Mark Price, Hot Rod Williams, a good group of guys. But our guards were all young, and so you just didn't know what would happen after the season."

Strange turn in Steph's life

On March 11, 1988, the Cavs hosted the Spurs and Curry scored four points in seven minutes in Cleveland's 117-107 win. With Sonya scheduled to give birth to their son around March 25, Curry knew the Cavs would be home then, so he went with the team on a five-day, three-game road trip and left her in the watch of his teammates' girlfriends. The first game on the trip was March 12 in Detroit. The next game was two nights later in New York.

Sonya and the women went to an Earth, Wind and Fire concert on March 13. That night, she had a feeling. The next day, she suddenly felt ... ready. She called Dell, who was helpless, unable to catch a flight home so quickly. She called on Daugherty's girlfriend, and this is where the story of Steph literally took a strange turn.

"She took me to one hospital and it was the wrong one," Sonya said. "So we needed a police escort get us to the other one in a hurry because I was so far ahead. We got there and they didn't have a room for us because it was on short notice. Finally they found a room and he came out and it was just me and him."

Akron General Medical Center welcomed Wardell Stephen Curry II, into the world on March 14, 1988.

"When Dell finally got there, we were just sort of numb, just trying to absorb all of that, and him not being there for the birth," she said.

For Dell Curry, newly married and newly fathered, it was a hectic time. He was a young man with responsibilities and a basketball career that showed promise but also, at the time, was still raw and vulnerable.

"Man, I was just a 24-year-old kid," he said. "I was excited, scared, nervous about everything. Here I was trying to raise a kid and concentrate on my job."

Charlotte becomes home for Currys

In a few months, along came another wrinkle: The expansion draft, which would alter his and Steph's life forever.

The NBA absorbed new franchises in Miami, Minneapolis, Orlando and Charlotte starting in the 1988-89 season. They would stock their rosters with help of the 26 established teams, which were required to place four unprotected players in a pool.

The Cavs had a fairly deep roster then and had to make a tough choice. The four new teams knew Cleveland would surrender a good player and it had to choose between veteran forward Mike Sanders and Dell Curry. Sanders was kept, Curry was unprotected.

And he went No. 2 in the expansion draft to the Hornets.

"We knew we'd lose him," Embry said. "We wanted to keep him badly but our team was on the verge of being a very good team and we couldn't gamble with that. It was a win-win for us and Charlotte."

Sure enough, the Cavs upped their victory total by 15 in 1988-89 to a then-record 57 wins. In Charlotte, Curry became a classic sixth man, bringing rapid scoring off the bench and one of the sweetest shooting strokes in the league. He played 16 NBA seasons, shot 40.2 percent from 3-point range for his career and from 1991-97 averaged 12.9 ppg.

"You look at how Dell shot the ball," Embry said, "and you can understand how Stephen manages to do what he does. His father provided a great example to his son."

Dell Curry spent 10 seasons in Charlotte, which the Currys made their permanent home. Another son, Seth, and daughter, Sydel, were born in Charlotte. And Steph? He took his first steps in Charlotte and just as important, his first dribble. And hasn't stopped since.

"The only thing that says Steph is from Akron is his birth certificate," said his father. "He doesn't have any recollection of Akron. Never been back, either."

Akron (somewhat) binds James, Curry

Thirty-eight months and 14 days before Steph Curry was delivered, Akron welcomed LeBron James. The only parent on his birth certificate was Gloria James. LeBron's father was absent and his identity remains a mystery to the public. From a family perspective, LeBron took a completely different path than Steph Curry. He lacked the stable household, famous father and upper middle-class privileges Stephen Curry enjoyed.

From a basketball perspective, the difference between the two players was drastic as well. LeBron was a prodigy at 12, an Ohio legend at 15, a Sports Illustrated coverboy before he graduated from high school and the first pick in the Draft at 18.

Curry was slightly built as a kid and lightly recruited as a teenager, even finding it hard to get a full scholarship at Virginia Tech. And after he became a national sensation at Davidson College, Curry was the third point guard taken in the 2009 Draft, after Ricky Rubio and, ahem, Jonny Flynn.

But now, look. The next few weeks will buzz about Steph Curry and LeBron James, two of the very best the NBA has to offer, two players in search of a championship.

They will shift between Oakland and Cleveland, cities that suddenly find themselves the envy of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and other glamorous NBA outposts sitting these Finals out. Should the Cavs lose and extend Cleveland's championship misery, the pain will also be felt in Akron, which proudly considers itself the Land of LeBron.

But in that situation, if that city so chooses, it can sift through the 1988 records at the Akron Medical Center for proof that no matter what happens in this series, Akron can't lose.

Veteran NBA writer Shaun Powell has worked for newspapers and other publications for more than 25 years. You can e-mail him here or follow him on Twitter.

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