Cavs vet Kevin Love’s recent comments show part of why he should stick

This season was a hell of a bounce-back season, all things considered, for Cleveland Cavaliers stretch big Kevin Love. No, it didn’t end how the team would’ve wanted, as the Cavaliers lost to the Atlanta Hawks on Friday night in the play-in game deciding the Eastern Conference’s eighth seed.

It was tough to see how the Cavaliers closed their year out, too, as the team was simply not the same squad post-All-Star break. Some of that was clearly because of injury issues, and the team had those throughout the season.

Even still, it was a year where the Cavaliers turned a corner, and circling back to Love, it was nice to see how he accepted a shift to a bench role, and blossomed in a key bench scoring role as a go-to catch-and-shoot threat. On the year, Love had 13.6 points, 7.2 rebounds and 2.2 assists per contest, and that was in only 22.5 minutes per game.

At this point in his career, given the injury problems he’s had in his time with the Cavaliers, and considering how he was limited to just 25 games in 2020-21, that was the right call. It was necessary, too, with Jarrett Allen‘s presence and with what Cleveland has going forward with Rookie of the Year frontrunner Evan Mobley.

It was great to see how bought-in Love was in that bench role, and he often gave the Cavaliers a spark as a shooter and defensive rebounder, but also as a locker room presence and veteran. The 33-year-old did admittedly have some moments of frustration that got the better of him in recent seasons prior to this one, and in 2019-20, in particular, and I’m not saying that wasn’t the case.

In this last campaign, where he was mostly healthy with the move to the bench, though, he was clearly so bought-in, and his enthusiasm as a teammate was palpable. Despite the loss to Atlanta, these comments from Love in media availability (via Evan Dammarell of Fear The Sword and Right Down Euclid) were telling, too, on that front.

These recent comments from Love show some of why he should stick around with the Cavs, perhaps beyond next season.

At this point, Love’s contract is expiring after next season. Now I get Love has not lived up to being near worthy of his huge 4-year, $120.4 million contract extension before the 2018-19 campaign, and next season, he’s set to make $28.9 million. Plenty of the reasoning for that has been his injury troubles since that time, which we touched on in relation to the 2020-21 season, for instance.

But he was great in a shift to a bench role this season, and with how Love was in that role this now recently-ended season, I could still foresee Love being a very good contributor this upcoming 2022-23 campaign. He’ll be in his age-34 season, and the team has to have a similar management of his minutes, in fairness.

Although with his shooting abilities (39.2 percent from three in 2021-22), defensive rebounding awareness/positioning and with his secondary playmaking in mind, too, I could see him still being a viable player for next season still. And the same goes for maybe another season following, to some extent. Perhaps the Cavs could extend Love this coming offseason if it’s fairly team-friendly, for what it’s worth.

As we again touched on, part of why that should feasibly play out is also for the leadership perspective with Love, who seems totally on-board with the Cavaliers again, and has seemingly an outstanding relationship with the young guys and coaching staff.

Love’s comments Dammarell hit on in that above tweet about him planning an offseason trip to Nashville, additionally with the Darius Garland and Dylan Windler element, echo that, too. It’d be something else to see Garland, Evan Mobley and others doing karaoke as well, obviously.

We’ll have to see what transpires and if Love is potentially extended, in a big offseason to come, but at this juncture, him retiring with the Cavs and sticking with the team from here seems reasonable.

As this team looks to level up, it’s still meaningful to have vets like Love, a still-knockdown shooter who has been through it all, around.