Who needs Kevin Love? This is the refrain spreading like the chorus to a bad pop song all across the basketball world today. When looking at the Cleveland Cavaliers’ 120-90 dismantling of the Golden State Warriors in Game 3 of the NBA finals, one cannot be blamed for immediately placing the responsibility for the victory on the key character who was absent. Love did not play due to a concussion suffered in Game 2. Of course, the Cavs are better without him, conventional wisdom says. To admit this, though, is to accept the notion that an NBA team can get better without a player who averages 16 and 9. Are the Cavs really a superior as a Big Two instead of a Big Three?
I will happily cop to making Love the focal point of my finals preview, and not for positive reasons. I speculated that in order for Cleveland to beat the Warriors, they would need superlative play from him. Now, the chatter is less about “will he play well?” and more “would he be better taking a long vacation to that Dolly Parton theme park and never return?” The best way to suss out whether or not he needs to be benched is to weigh what my dad used to call “opportunity costs”. As in, is the benefit of Love’s presence in the lineup outweighed by the cost of that presence?
Love’s benefits are obvious: he’s a good three-point shooting big man who can spread the floor on offense. Hypothetically, his length should be a plus against a smaller Golden State team. He should also help on the boards, as he averaged almost 10 rebounds per game across the regular season and playoffs. The cost is that he has rotated poorly and gave the Warrior bigs ample opportunity to get into space. Plus, in their Game 3 win, the Cavs crushed the Warriors in rebounds, 60-41. They must not have missed Love at all. OK, so he’s a big barrel full of hot trash, right? Put him in a box and mail him to the Russian league. Not so fast.
At the end of the first quarter of Game 2, the Cavaliers held a 21-19 lead. This was with LeBron scoring no points and Love playing all but the last 1:28 of the quarter. Granted, Love was blocked multiple times by Andrew Bogut, which got the Oracle crowd pumped up early. This leads to the impression that Love has a soft underbelly and can’t bang with a truly physical frontcourt player. Still, by the end of the second quarter, the Warriors’ advantage was a manageable eight points, and at this juncture in the game, we now know that Love was concussed. When he pulled himself from the game and was replaced by Iman Shumpert, the lead was nine. At the conclusion of that quarter, the lead was 20. Cleveland didn’t fully wilt until Love came out.
Richard Jefferson, the hero of Game 3, played 26 minutes and scored 12 points in Game 2. His plus/minus was -13, despite playing the bulk of that game without Love. One game is a small sample size, to be sure, but for much of the NBA playoffs, fans diagnose problems on a game-by-game basis. Nevermind that just a couple weeks ago, we were praising the Cavs (and Love) for finally figuring out how to play a modern, pace-and-space style. Forget that last Sunday, trigger-happy analysts were expecting a Warriors sweep. I was not immune to the doom and gloom either. Our jobs are to develop a narrative for each installment in this drama, even though it’s akin to claiming The Sopranos is a bad show just because you watched the episode where Tony has the 20-minute dream.
Today, the Jefferson/Love switch appears to be the magic bullet to beat the Warriors. In a few days, will it remain that way? Buried underneath the big numbers for Cleveland’s starters is a collection of far more troubling lines. The Cavs’ combined for 15 points off the bench. That’s out of the 120 they scored in Game 3. Four of those points were scored by Jordan McRae in three minutes of fourth-quarter garbage time. LeBron James played a whopping, Kobe-esque 40 minutes last night. JR Smith played 38 minutes. Old man Richard Jefferson played almost as many minutes as he has spent years on this planet. The bench player to get the most minutes in the game was Shumpert, and he went 1-5 from the field for three points. This says to me that the Cavs have one lineup they can throw at the Warriors, that they will need three more performances just like this to win this series. If you subtract Jefferson from the bench in Game 2, the Cavs’ reserves scored 18 of 77 points, led by Matthew Dellavedova with seven points on 2-9 shooting.
How many times can the Cavs realistically do this with next to no production from their second and third units? This is especially true when considering that the Warriors have one of the deepest benches in the NBA, if not the deepest, and got 40 points from their reserves in their Game 2 blowout. This is why it’s an absolute folly to demand Love get frozen in carbonite and dumped in Lake Erie for the rest of the finals. They’re going to need him at some point in the next two games if they want to remain competitive. They will need his scoring ability and his prowess on the glass, even if that’s off the bench.
What they cannot do is allow the hot take machine to dictate their strategy going forward. Steph Curry is a ticking time bomb who will go off eventually. Same with Klay Thompson. We collectively wrote that team off against a superior Oklahoma City after Game 4 of the Western Conference finals, but the Splash Brothers found enough of their groove to turn the series back in their favor. Cleveland will also have to win at least one game in Oakland to claim the championship. To do that, they’re going to need more than five players. Who needs Love? Probably the Cavs.
