Ask Wayne Embry about NBA legend Oscar Robertson, and the Raptors senior advisor makes plain his reverence when addressing a sports marketing class at Ryerson University last week.

Embry doesn’t just rank Robertson as an all-time favourite teammate — he says the 12-time MVP is one of the top four players in league history.

But neither friendship nor fandom stopped Embry, in his first season as Milwaukee Bucks general manager, from pulling an aging Robertson aside and having “the talk.”

With Robertson’s production in decline, Embry let his long-time colleague know the club would soon start seeking younger players to help phase him out. It was an awkward conversation made even more difficult by Embry and Robertson’s shared history.

The point, Embry told the roughly 150 students at the lecture hall, was that even though basketball is a game it’s above all a business.

And not always a pretty one.

But in this city, the basketball industry is increasingly intriguing, which is why Ryerson sports marketing professor Cheri Bradish teamed with the Raptors to build a course around it.

Bradish, who co-teaches the course with Raptors executive Teresa Resch, says the class — titled “Global Sports Marketing: The Business of Basketball” — is the only one of its kind she knows of. It’s rare, Bradish says, for a big-league team to formally partner with a local university to work on a semester-long academic project this specific.

And it’s also unusual for a Raptors exec to add a university gig to her full-time duties, but Resch says the class doesn’t feel like work because it combines her two passions — basketball and teaching.

“I come from a family of educators,” said Resch, the Raptors vice-president of basketball operations and player development. “If it’s something you want to do, it’s not really that big of a time commitment.”

A series of circumstances combined to make this winter the ideal time to start the course, which is made up of third- and fourth-year undergrads.

First, Bradish knew the NBA all-star game would focus the entire basketball industry’s attention on Toronto and make the city the target of various hoops-related marketing campaigns.

Second, the new Raptors 905 farm team in Mississauga gives her students a ready-made case study. Much of the class’ research and hands-on work deals with researching the best way to sell the D-League team to a local market historically unkind to minor league sports.

“They’re operational strategy and marketing cases,” says Bradish, the sports marketing chair at the Ted Rogers School of Management. “They’re somewhat hypothetical but allow the students to dive into a marketing strategy.”

On Ryerson’s campus, basketball topics resonate even more strongly these days.

Last winter, Ryerson hosted the Men’s Final 8 basketball tournament, which the CIS moved to Toronto in search of a bigger audience and more corporate support. And this season the school’s men’s varsity team has ridden a 12-1 start to its first No. 1 national ranking.

Fourth-year forward Juwon Grannum is enrolled in the course, hoping to learn the hoops industry in case the pro career he’s aiming for doesn’t pan out.

“It’s understanding and knowing the opportunities that basketball, and the business side of it, has to offer,” says Grannum, who is averaging 6.5 points and 5.2 rebounds per game this season. “The networking and knowing different paths people have taken. Not everybody knew what they wanted to do at first, but they found their way.”

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The class meets twice a week, with the first session devoted to theory and assigned readings. Thursday afternoons the class convenes in a larger lecture hall, where Resch moderates panel discussions involving basketball executives from Toronto and beyond.

This past Thursday, Embry addressed the class alongside Matt Winick, senior advisor to the NBA’s president of basketball operations, and Patrick Engelbrecht, the Raptors director of global scouting.

“I was never lucky enough to have a class like this, where we had speakers of this magnitude lined up,” Engelbrecht said during the panel discussion. “And in Canada? Six is on the rise.”

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