The NBA offseason is in full swing, which means it’s peak season for dumping on Kevin Love. The NBA finals lead to the NBA draft, which leads to the start of free agency, which leads to the opening of the NBA summer league in Las Vegas. And in between all of it is discussion and rumors about what the Cavaliers might be able to get, if anything, for Love. It’s the modern NBA offseason life cycle.
The latest rumor was Love being dealt away from the Cavaliers in a three-team deal that would have sent him to Denver, enabling Paul George to join LeBron’s latest superteam incarnation in Cleveland. That specific deal working out is now supposedly “very unlikely”. The Cavaliers also reportedly spoke before the draft with Phoenix to gauge their interest in a three-way deal to ship Love out and land George. There have even been rumblings of a discussed five-team framework that would have landed Cleveland George and Carmelo Anthony, with Love going ... to a city never determined. Some of these discussions undoubtedly took place after the Cavs parted ways with general manager David Griffin, meaning even Cleveland’s interim front office staffers – people with limited power and long-term job prospects – are going with the approach of: “Uhhhhh ... I guess we could try to trade Kevin and see if that works?”
The message, conveyed from front office discussions to online comments sections, is this: Love does not conquer all. He is the easy scapegoat for why the Cavaliers have lost two NBA finals in the past three seasons. Or, at the very least, the message is that Cleveland can do much better than Love as the third member of its “big three” when it tries to take down Golden State again next year. But there is one problem with that thought: Love is pretty darn good at basketball. Is he the best player in basketball? No. Of course not. But he is the only sweet-shooting big man in NBA history who can score and rebound and is a good team-mate and has a ring and four NBA All-Star appearances and more than 10,000 career points all by the age of 28 ... and yet apparently can’t be discarded quickly enough.
It’s hard to look at this year’s NBA finals and come to the conclusion that Love is to blame for the outcome. He was far from perfect, but the same could be said of everyone else in the series who isn’t LeBron James or Kevin Durant. Love averaged 16 points and 11 rebounds per game in the 2017 finals and shot 38.7% from three while playing his (well-known) butt off in every game. If blame must be cast for the the Cavaliers losing to a 73-9 team that went out and added Durant, then Kyle Korver, Deron Williams, Tristan Thompson (and maybe the Kardashians) deserve more than Love.
None of the players rumored to be desired by Cleveland in a trade are even a clear upgrade over Love. George is a year younger and better defensive player, but would mean a big loss in rebounding. The players are nearly equal in three-point shooting, PER and win shares. Anthony is five years older and Love’s lesser in rebounding, PER and win shares. He also hasn’t taken the court in a playoff game in four years. Free agent Blake Griffin, another 28-year old power forward, is Love’s lesser in rebounding and three-point shooting. Love twice averaged more than 26 points per game as his team’s primary scorer in Minnesota, while Griffin’s career-high is 24.1 ppg in 2014. Yet as the Cavs are wondering who might take Love off their hands, Griffin is expecting big money offers from around the league.
Basketball Reference estimates that if Love’s career ended today at age 28, he’d have a 42.8% chance of making the Hall of Fame. That’s better than the odds for George, Griffin and even Manu Ginobili. But one gets the sense that if the Hall of Fame ever let Love in, they’d try to trade him to a different museum at the first opportunity.
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact reason that dumping on Love became an NBA tradition. As a UCLA product who was the fifth overall pick in 2008, he certainly has a pedigree that usually earns some respect out of the gate. Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that next to the all-time talent LeBron James and the ball-handling wizard Kyrie Irving, he looks boring and pedestrian. But if being worse than James and Irving is worthy of shame, then 99% of the players in the NBA can’t show their faces in public. Maybe it’s because he never took the Timberwolves to the postseason during his time in Minnesota, but the list of players that could have taken that roster to the playoffs in the West – the likes of Corey Brewer was a core player on Love’s last Wolves team, remember – might start and end with James and Russell Westbrook. Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that we don’t expect white guys to be good at basketball anymore. Maybe it feels so absurd for rational people – meaning those who aren’t sports debate show hosts – to rip players of James and Irving’s stature that Love is just the next easy target for every Cavaliers failing.
Love’s biggest failing is that there is not two of him. Golden State beat Cleveland 4-1 in the finals, but the true score between the franchises remains 4-3. Golden State has four stars in Durant, Steph Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green, while the Cavs have three and are therefore stuck in second place. Until that math changes, until Cleveland’s non-existent GM figures a way to swap Love for not just one star but two, the Warriors will be the heavy favorites and the NBA will be right back here again next offseason with another round of Kevin Love disparagement. That’s a tradition the league won’t trade for anything.
