Those 23s can handle a dagger

In the quiet hours before the funeral that was Game 2 of Raptors-Cavaliers, one hall of famer extended a warm hand to another and offered condolences.

This was Hubie Brown, the 84-year-old ESPN analyst and legendary coach, patting the mighty shoulder of Wayne Embry, the Raptors’ 81-year-old senior adviser and basketball lifer.

“You’ve seen a few too many of those,” Brown said to Embry.

Brown was speaking about the Raptors’ gutting loss in Game 1 of the series — a defeat largely self-inflicted by a Toronto team that turned layups into empty possessions and open shots into rushed misses. But Brown might as well have been referring to the knife through Toronto’s basketball heart that was Game 2, when the Raptors were backhoed into a 2-0 series hole by the 41 minutes of basketball genius authored by LeBron James. James’s 43 points and 14 assists reincarnated what had been a dead plotline in Raptorland this season — the one about the pointlessness of continuing to build a team around Toronto’s so-farcowering all-stars Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan.

If things keep going the way they’re going, after all — and James’s teams own a 21-0 series record when they go ahead 2-0 — this will be the third straight spring the Cavaliers banish the Raptors to the off-season in a manner lopsided enough to suggest team president Masai Ujiri ought to rethink the franchise’s direction.

Neither of the Raptors’ two previous falls to LeBron would be as disappointing as the one from which they find themselves just two losses removed. Until this series began Toronto’s NBAers were enjoying the best season in franchise history, a record 59-win year that made them Las Vegas favourites to end James’s streak of representing the Eastern Conference in the NBA final for seven straight seasons.

But in the week since the Cavaliers were handed a 30point loss in Game 6 of their first-round series with the Indiana Pacers, James has done what great players do. He has expertly steadied his oncereeling squad with signature performances, including a 45-point explosion in Game 7 against the Pacers and Thursday’s moon-shot-dotted dismantling of the Raptors.

And for Embry, there’s surely a sense of déjà vu. When Embry was general manager of the Cavaliers beginning in 1986, after all, he built promising, accomplished teams that repeatedly found themselves on the raw end of a nemesis’s dominance. Five times Embry’s Cavaliers met Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls in the playoffs between 1988 and 1994. And five times Jordan’s Bulls crushed Cleveland’s hopes.

“He’s put the dagger in us a lot,” Embry once said of His Airness. “But I still respect his greatness.”

Sitting courtside at the Air Canada Centre this week, thinking back to those Jordaninduced disappointments, Embry looked down the floor to where James and the Cavaliers were warming.

“It’s the same — exactly the same,” Embry said. “You’ve got to beat greatness.”

Embry, to be clear, has a basketball resume so vast that, for every lowlight, there’s a triumphant moment to balance the ledger. So as much as Embry will probably never stop getting asked about The Shot — Jordan’s famed 1989 legend-making buzzer beater over Craig Ehlo that propelled the Bulls into the second round and added to the city of Cleveland’s vast pile of sadsack sporting moments — Embry can also speak with authority about the joy that comes with toppling a giant.

“There’s no bigger thrill than beating greatness. And that should be an inspiration, not a deflation,” Embry said. “It should be an inspiration to go out and try and beat LeBron.”

If Toronto’s basketball watchers need a comeback story from which to model faint hope, Embry has one. The year was 1968. The beleaguered team was the Boston Celtics, for whom the then-30-year-old Embry was a respected veteran role player. Down 3-1 in the Eastern final, Boston’s opponent was the NBA defending champion Philadelphia 76ers — a team anchored by Wilt Chamberlain, the only man to score 100 points in a game. Just like Embry’s team of today, his Celtics had dropped two games at home. Just like Embry’s team of today, they were being written off by the local media.

“There was a sportswriter in Boston who said, ‘That’ll be the last time they play here. Might as well take up the court,’ ” Embry said. “And that’s when (John) Havlicek and I went in and wrote on the board ‘Pride’ with little dollar signs underneath it.”

The dollar signs were to remind teammates of the bonus money they’d be forfeiting with elimination, this in the generations before megamillions wallpapered the league. And as for the “Pride” — it became a Celtics rallying cry through the ages after the Bostonians came back to beat Wilt and the 76ers en route to a championship.

“It’s the same thing all over again: You’ve just got to try and figure out how to beat greatness,” Embry said.

Those 1968 Celtics, of course, were hardly unproven nobodies; they beat greatness with their own dose of it. Bill Russell was the lifeblood of that team, which won a remarkable 11 championships in a 13-season span. Embry had a hand in just one ring, in 1968. And that moment of glory doesn’t necessarily take away the sting of title pursuits forever unfulfilled. The parallels between those late-1980s Cavaliers and these suddenly hangdog Raptors are considerable. Like the Raptors, the 1989 Cavaliers were built on depth. Like the Raptors, they reeled off the NBA’s second-best record in the regular season. Their 57 wins gave them home-court advantage against Jordan’s 47-win Bulls.

“We felt, and I think it was a pretty common feeling throughout the league, that one through 12 we were the best team in the league,” Embry said. “But they had Jordan.”

So even when it looked like Cleveland might win the series — they ignited their home crowd by taking a one-point lead with three seconds to play — Embry knew too much about the still-looming threat.

“I was standing in the tunnel where I always stood to watch the game … Everybody was celebrating. And all the fans were saying, ‘Come on, Wayne! You gotta (get excited)!’ Embry remembered. “And I said, ‘No, no. He’s going to get one more touch.’ And sure enough, he did.”

The “he,” then and now, was wearing No. 23.

“It’s still a nightmare,” Embry said.

He was talking about Jordan’s famed dagger, but he could have been talking about all the damage that’s been done by another great one. Some mountains, you never climb.