Cavaliers: Three goals for Kevin Love for post-All-Star break
By Dan Gilinsky
Cleveland Cavaliers big Kevin Love is by far the team’s best offensive weapon, and the presence of Andre Drummond should help him. Factoring in that, we’ll take a look at a few post-All-Star break goals for Love here.
Kevin Love hasn’t been the easiest player for the Cleveland Cavaliers‘ staff and first-time NBA head coach John Beilein to coach this season.
Love had an on-bench outburst at the Toronto Raptors on New Year’s Eve of which he was reportedly fined for, and chucked a pass mid-game in dodgeball elimination-type style at Cedi Osman unnecessarily in a game against the Oklahoma City Thunder in early January.
Additionally, according to a report from The Athletic‘s Joe Vardon and Shams Charania, also of Stadium (subscription required), Love was shouting at general manager Koby Altman before that aforementioned game against OKC after shootaround regarding the direction of the Cavs.
Love completely downplayed that incident and apologized for his actions in previous media availability, though, as was on-script.
Needless to say, the writing seemed to be on the wall that Love, even though he is due to make $91.5 million over the next three years following 2019-20, would be moved by the trade deadline on February 6. Those incidents on-floor/on the bench this season and visible frustration he’s showed throughout games made that seem to be a good possibility.
However, since that point in early January, Love has played really well and has reestablished himself as the Cavaliers’ best player, and has been noticeably more engaged and has put forth max effort. On the season, Love has averaged 17.7 points on a career-high 55.6 percent effective field goal shooting clip, to go with 9.8 rebounds and 3.0 assists per game, as noted by Basketball Reference.
Plus, in the Cavs’ last 15 games, of which Love has been active 13, Love has averaged 19.5 points, 8.3 rebounds and 3.3 assists per game, per NBA.com. He’s also shot 39.4 percent from three-point range in that stretch.
The presence of trade deadline acquisition Andre Drummond should open up things up for Love for the rest of this 2019-20 season, too, and though Love reportedly preferred to be traded before the deadline and to a contender, according to Cleveland.com’s Chris Fedor, if this experiment with Drummond works out, maybe Love will want to stick around.
The fit with Drummond leads me to my first post-All-Star break goal for Love.