Cavs: Bleacher Report ranking Kevin Love as no. 9 PF this season is reasonable

The 2019-20 campaign was not all smooth sailing in regards to Kevin Love, but he still proved to be so valuable for the Cleveland Cavaliers.

We all know that Kevin Love is not the player he once was in his days with the Minnesota Timberwolves. Love’s had a number of injuries throughout his career, and with the Cleveland Cavaliers, he’s been sidelined often.

Love only appeared in 22 games in 2018-19, mostly due to toe surgery, which was unfortunate right after he and the squad agreed on a then-four-year, $120.4 million contract extension. Plus, this now-past season for the Cavs, given that they were not invited to Orlando, Love was not a model teammate on a number of occasions leading until until early-to-mid January.

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Love had two on-floor/on-bench outbursts in games at the Toronto Raptors and against the Oklahoma City Thunder.

In addition to that, he reportedly shouted at general manager Koby Altman after a Cavs’ shootaround before that said early January OKC game regarding the Cavs’ direction.

From there, though, Love apologized for his actions, was a noticeably better teammate, and really model one, and seemed much more engaged.

While Love has been mentioned in trade rumors throughout his Cleveland tenure, with how the novel coronavirus pandemic could cause the salary cap to decrease, and also the 2021 free agent pool, I expect Love to stick around through 2020-21.

That’s just fine, too, as while Love is currently set to make well over $31.2 million, he still is arguably the Cavs’ most valuable player.

That’s when you factor in how he’s one of the NBA’s best shooting bigs, is an elite defensive rebounder and is such a good passing big. Love had a healthy 17.6 points, 9.8 rebounds and 3.2 assists per game.

Love is not an All-Star player at this point in his career, but he’s again still a highly productive player for the Cavaliers, and that was indicated by Bleacher Report’s Andy Bailey and Dan Favale in their ranking of the top 15 power forwards in the NBA in 2019-20. The sources they referenced for what qualified for player/lineup data came from Cleaning the Glass and Basketball Reference.

So what’s my take on Love’s ranking?

In that ranking, Love being slotted in at number nine, which seems reasonable from a Cleveland Cavaliers fan’s perspective.

Love being slotted in at number nine slightly above Paul Millsap, who is one of the league’s best defensive 4’s for the Denver Nuggets, and who is in a similar realm as a mid-post player and has shot 44.0 percent from three-point range is debatable.

Those could go either way, and between Love at nine, Millsap at 10 and the Philadelphia 76ers’ Tobias Harris, a polished inside-out threat at 11 in that ranking, it’s tough to say for me definitively who is the best of those three best players in a vacuum. Millsap and Harris are on teams that are borderline contenders, whereas Love is on the rebuilding Cavs.

That said, one could make an argument that with Love’s mid-post scoring/playmaking prowess and with his knockdown shooting ability, that he could play more into those team’s success in Denver and Philly.

I’d imagine in plenty of stretches, Love would mesh much better from a shooting standpoint than Al Horford has alongside Joel Embiid in stretches, though, again Harris was considered a 4 more so. Or Love and Nikola Jokic in stretches for the Nuggets? That’d be something.

In terms of the two ahead of Love, at least when it comes to this season, it is definitely clear that Love has not had quite the same inside-out impact as the uber-athletic John Collins for the Atlanta Hawks I believe, who was slated at one spot above Love by Bailey and Favale.

At number seven, Kristaps Porzingis of the Dallas Mavericks’ two-way expertise has been shown in leading to winning in a big way, too. He’s had 19.2 points per outing and is much more capable as a ball-handler than Love, and is one of the league’s best rim protectors that’s had 2.1 blocks per game.

Moreover, to me, Love being ranked as the number nine 4 this season, at least thus far leading into the Orlando bubble for most teams (though not the Cleveland Cavaliers) by Bailey and Favale, is reasonable.

Love being a top 10 power forward still seems to be a fair take, and his offensive presence should continually help the development of Collin Sexton, Darius Garland, Kevin Porter Jr. and others next season.