About four years ago I wrote an article about how Kevin Love was overrated.
After the way the Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals played out last week, I feel vindicated.
Let’s start with a recap of the first article – Kevin Love played on terrible teams, put up huge numbers, but never made the playoffs. He’ll never have a winning season.
Luckily, he won the LeBron sweepstakes and for some reason the King wanted him on his team. Love instantly went to a contender and ruined my Heatles at the same time.
There were several reasons why I knew K Love would fail:
He was sponsored by Starter – I really don’t have to go into detail here, but if you are allegedly a MAX contract type player how the hell did you not get with a better company.
He picked the number 0 because he knew he had 0 reasons to make that much money for just being an average player. Sorry, Damian Lillard.
When he finally got to the playoffs his shooting percentage dropped by 15 points. What type of “superstar player” gets worse in the playoffs?
To his credit, he played defense that one time on the final possession in game 7 of the 2016 Finals. It just happened to the one moment where he contested a Steph Curry three, but let’s not forget that without that LeBron block and that Kyrie three, that would have been a waste of his one defensive play.
Now let’s fast forward to the 2018 playoffs.
We have someone at 10YS, names wont be mentioned but it starts with K and ends with AIR.
This not to be named person boldly claimed, one can call it a hot take, that the man they Call Kevin Love would return to the FAT Kevin Love AKA Minnesota Kevin Love.
Let’s just say he was kind of right but absolute wrong.
First of all in all 3 of their losses he was great at doing his Minnesota thing, putting up empty stat lines while playing no defense. Love put up 17.6 PPG, 10 RPG on 44% FG. He was also scored on 96% of the time Al Hortford touched the ball. (100% true 10YS Fact.)
This is where it gets interesting, when Kevin Love did absolutely nothing in the Cavs win, not only did Lebron have to carry this bucket, he literally almost forgot how to play basketball.
The Cavs played their best basketball while Love was not on the court. The biggest blessing happened in game 6 of the series when Love got tapped on the head and wasn’t able to return to the game.
Before the concussion, those must have been the worst five minutes of basketball I have ever seen the Cavs play. They were down by four points while it happened and while that may not seem like a lot, remember, when a team went up by ten this series the game was pretty much over.
Following that was the greatest 43 mins of Cleveland basketball, they went on and dominated the game to easily force a game seven. You saw what happened in game seven, with Kevin Love spending all his time in the tunnel talking to ESPN personalities, the Cavs were able to close out the Celtics on the road. LeBron was his usual historically great self, but Love’s replacement may have been the deciding factor.
Some people will say it was a sacrifice made, but that only sounds like an excuse to me. The Cavs are 100 times better when Kevin Love isn’t on the court as shown by that game seven. Not only was he replaced by Uncle Jeff, but uncle Jeff put up numbers Kevin Love would dream of putting up in a Cavs win against the Celtics.
There is scientific evidence that the Cavs are better without Kevin Love on and off the court. As seen by the real ESPN stat found out by real researchers. (That was before game 7 too so add 9 more points to that total)
The Warriors better pray that Kevin Love gets over this concussion, starts and plays this series .