James Jones has played with LeBron James a long time, or at least feels like it. He has been on his team for every one of the six consecutive NBA finals James has reached; like LeBron, he has three championship rings. He’s seen a lot.

“You see a little bit of Bird in him, you see some Magic, you see some Oscar,” said Jones last year, as LeBron was beginning to dismantle the Toronto Raptors in the conference final. “A lot of Big O. He’ll tell you he sees a lot of Big O in himself.”

That’s Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and Oscar Robertson; Raptors executive Wayne Embry, who played against luminaries like Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell, considers the Big O the greatest player he has ever seen. LeBron was always compared to Michael Jordan because Jordan is considered the modern apex of the game, but stylistically he has always been an evolutionary version of a different tree. Raptors forward Patrick Patterson says you try to be physical, to keep him out of the lane, to make him shoot, to limit his passing. But.

“Yeah, definitely go in with those points, but at the same time, he is LeBron James,” says Patterson, the day before Game 1 in Cleveland. “Hands-down the best player in the world right now.”

Starting Monday, the Raptors get to face the game’s apex predator again. Last year it looked closer on paper than it did in real life: in a six-game series, the Raptors were outscored by an average of 15.5 points per game, which is a lot when you won two of those games. LeBron hasn’t lost an Eastern Conference playoff series since 2009, the year DeMar DeRozan was drafted.

But now, Cleveland is a lesser thing. In the second half of the season they went 21-20. After the all-star break the only team whose defence was worse was the sitcom-esque Los Angeles Lakers. Cleveland has gone 14-15 against playoff teams since beating Golden State on Christmas Day, and in the first round LeBron averaged 32.8 points on .543 shooting, .450 from three-point range, plus 9.8 rebounds, 9.0 assists, 3.0 steals and 2.0 blocks, and the Cavaliers swept an utterly average Indiana team by . . . an average of four points per game.

So LeBron played monster basketball and Cleveland could, and maybe should, have lost a couple of those games. And the Raptors still won’t say this is a team that can be had. Why?

“They’re going to try to outscore you more than anything else,” says coach Dwane Casey, “but they’re still very capable defensively. Just because of James and the way he reads the floor and reads situations, helps his teammates.”

It’s clear: LeBron looms bigger than any player in the league since Michael Jordan, and there’s no changing that. Ask players about how he runs an offence, and they gush. One problem is when you play LeBron, what you are really playing is his teammates in an elevated state. It’s not just the hellacious dribble-dribble-zigzag-shoot of Kyrie Irving, or the fill-the-cracks work of Kevin Love — it’s Channing Frye, J.R. Smith, Kyle Korver. LeBron plus three-pointers is one of the great offensive systems ever devised.

“When you help on LeBron, he makes the right decisions,” says Kyle Lowry. “When you help on Kyrie, they make the right decisions. Even on Kevin Love, you help on him, he makes the right decisions. Sometimes they’re on the floor with five shooters. It changes the game. You’ve got nobody in the paint. Somebody drives, you gotta help, sink, fill, kick, swing, swing. You have to move with them.”

“I mean, as a fan of the game and as a fan of certain players in the league, I will have my awe moments,” says Patterson. “So without a doubt, I will be out there guarding him to the best of my ability, realizing he is the opponent, but at the same time he’s LeBron James. I’m a fan of his, and certain plays he makes I’m sure I’m going to be in awe. But he’s on the opposing team. He’s who we have to go through to get to the next round.”

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“That’s LeBron,” says forward P.J. Tucker, who will likely get major minutes defending James. “He makes his whole team better. Every team he’s ever been on, he makes the whole team better. Just the way he passes the ball, the way he pushes the ball, the way he finds other people. That’s what makes him LeBron.”

“I think that’s the big key, isn’t it? Not letting everybody else kill you. I think that makes the monster even bigger.”

This is the biggest test in franchise history, and the biggest opportunity. The Toronto Raptors enter this series with a split personality — capable of greatness, capable of absurd failures. If they are going to be anything more than a footnote on the great man’s path, then they will need to become bigger than they seem. They will need to play fearless basketball, smart basketball, without much margin for error. They need to show up. This isn’t Milwaukee, which was a puzzle that could be solved. This is LeBron, a walking legend, the monster. This time there is a soft underbelly, waiting to be exposed. It’s there. And because it’s LeBron James, that still might not be enough.

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