A Love/Hate Relationship
Kevin Love’s relationship with Minneapolis and the Timberwolves is complicated. So is trading for him.
Is Kevin Love as good as his numbers suggest, or as overrated as his detractors claim? Is he a me-first locker room cancer, or a long-suffering recipient of continual disrespect from a bumbling organization? Will the Cleveland Cavaliers cement themselves as contenders by acquiring him, or mortgage their future for fool’s gold? Not unlike the city he plays in, the answers are: Yes, but…
Sat., July 12: Looking for Love … in all the wrong places?
A few hours and a dozen conversations after I arrived in downtown Minneapolis for Major League Baseball’s All-Star weekend, I picked up on something peculiar: an inordinate number of statements were accompanied by a qualifier. Regardless of with whom I conversed, the theme was consistent.
“The summer here is gorgeous, but… you might not live through the winter to see it again. The public transit system is great, but… not if you have to take the 5, 16, or 94. The downtown area is really fun, but… it has a long way to go until it’s truly safe and vibrant. Minnesotans are extremely friendly, but… have you ever heard the term ‘Minnesota Nice?’”
Even answers to my follow-up questions and counterpoints frequently began with, “Yes, but…”
In a way, this is part of the city’s charm. One of America’s loveliest, most progressive, complex and interesting cities is so exceedingly modest, self-aware, and ready with an apology, it might just be America’s best-kept secret. So well kept, in fact, it’s as if Minneapolis isn’t even in on it.
In no way was I pursuing a modest topic. Since the season’s end, Kevin Love’s actions and words have been loud and unapologetic. Once LeBron announced his return to Cleveland, Love’s desire to part ways with the Timberwolves became the biggest story in the NBA. On the surface, it’s counterintuitive to seek opinions and answers about an NBA star during baseball’s summer celebration, but I’ve long believed that a major aspect of most sports stories is place — physical, cultural, and historical context.
As a native New Yorker, I spent a significant chunk of my life amid people who tried to peddle narrow perspectives as worldliness by packaging them in condescension. For much of my childhood, I thought there was a state called Ohiowa. A few years ago, when I informed a relative of my plan to visit Madison, Wisconsin, she fixed me with a look so long and quizzical, one could have imagined I’d announced my intent to defecate thrice in my hand and juggle the results. Wisconsin? What in the hell do you think is out there?
It’s a consistent, reliable truth that opinions about the unfamiliar reveal more about the people who hold the opinions than the subject. So it is with the Midwest, with Minneapolis, and with Kevin Love.
Depending on who you ask these days, Love is a top-five player, a top-10 player, a top-20 player, the best power forward in the NBA, the fifth best power forward in the NBA, undervalued, overrated, the key to Cleveland’s first sports championship in 50 years, or proof of the Cavaliers’ shortsightedness.
I descended on Minneapolis hoping to sort out just how good Love is; why things between him and the Timberwolves turned so acrimonious; why the Cavs are willing to trade potentially electric future talents for a player who has never even taken a team to a .500 record; and why Love’s teammates appear unfazed by the prospect of watching a 20-and-10 guy with unusual three-point range walk out the door.
Saturday afternoon I walked through Loring Park, navigating throngs of people tanning and playing basketball, past a strange though strangely alluring fountain shaped like an oversized dandelion, and emerged on Nicollet Avenue, where I immediately saw a giant cloud and the sky reflected in a glass building. It looked like a postcard from a beautiful future. Walking toward downtown, the skyline looked magical, too. The buildings had that weird, metallic shimmer of the inside of a candy bar wrapper, and the city seemed like a strange and gigantic jewel.
In a bar called Sneaky Pete’s, which was next to a strip club and boasted a staff I suspect might be doing double duty between the two establishments, I chatted up two Minnesotans about the city. James described Minneapolis as “a strange brew,” and Tommy chimed in “There’s a little bit of everyone here.” They went back and forth cataloguing the population. “Swedes,” James declared nodding for emphasis. “Germans, of course,” Tommy added. James lightly tapped his temple twice, like a person finally recalling a word on the tip of his tongue. “Somalians and Vietnamese.”
“Any black people besides Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis?” I was joking, but the names didn’t register with them anyway. I shifted the topic to Kevin Love, and James grunted. “He’s lucky he’s not black. A black player acting the way he does would be crucified by the media.” Tommy, a black man, interjected, his face contorted as if he smelled a foul odor. “Got nothing to do with that. I don’t blame him at all. He wants to move forward.” Tommy took a sip of his Lonely Blonde and shook his head sullenly. “But the Wolves are always running in place.”
“You walk into the locker room every year, and it’s completely turned over,” Love says. “There’s new guys everywhere. And then it happens again and again. You start to wonder: Is there really a plan here? Is there really any kind of a … plan?”
To Have Loved and Lost
“Running in place” turns out to be a charitable depiction. A review of the Timberwolves’ front-office ineptitude is so staggering, it’s difficult to choose the most ludicrous characteristic.
In 1994, the Timberwolves hired Kevin McHale as soon as he retired from playing; in under two years McHale went from the nebulous job description of TV analyst/Special Assistant to Assistant GM to Vice President of Basketball Operations — at which point McHale promptly hired his former college teammate Flip Saunders as head coach. McHale drafted Kevin Garnett, then undercut that move by colluding with Joe Smith to manipulate the NBA’s salary-cap regulations, thus forfeiting a bucket of draft picks and handicapping the franchise’s ability to build during Garnett’s prime.
McHale would later fire Saunders, assume coaching duties for 31 games, hire and quickly fire Dwane Casey, promote then-assistant Randy Wittman, give former Celtic teammate Danny Ainge the gift of Garnett and an immediate championship, fire Wittman, and assume the head coaching position again for a season before leaving to take the same job in Houston.
Meanwhile, Saunders went on to coach in Detroit and Washington, the latter of which fired him and replaced him with … Wittman. Within a year, Saunders would return to Minnesota to became part-owner and president of basketball operations. At the end of this past season, Saunders returned to the role of head coach, as well.
Can anyone fault Love for his lack of faith in organizational direction?
That wasn’t even the worst of it. Sports reporter turned real estate mogul turned basketball executive David Kahn submitted a four-year stint as the team’s general manager that was so beyond the grasp of logic, it could have served as the answer to “what if David Lynch made a movie about a GM?”
During Kahn’s tenure, the Wolves drafted both Ricky Rubio and Johnny Flynn ahead of Steph Curry. They also took Ty Lawson in that same 2009 first round … and promptly shipped Lawson out in a pre-arranged deal. They selected Wesley Johnson when Demarcus Cousins, Paul George, Greg Monroe, and Larry Sanders were still available; picked Derrick Williams No. 2 overall (albeit in a draft where the better players went outside the top 10); drafted Chandler Parsons and traded him for cash the same night. They also purged a young, super-skilled Al Jefferson, then used the resultant cap space for … Darko Milicic.
As Love — in spite of his coaches and front office — emerged as a bona fide All-NBA talent, the Wolves surrounded him during the 2010-11 season with Johnson (who they traded at the end of the following season), Michael Beasley (aiding Miami’s quest to create the Big 3), Luke Ridnour, and the aforementioned Darko. In a conference that has maintained a fierce level of competition year-in and year-out, the expectation that Love should — or even could — lead the Wolves to the postseason is ridiculous.
Against any hint of self-preservation, Kevin Love still was willing to sign a five-year max contract that would’ve guaranteed his presence until 2017, but the Wolves expressed skepticism over his worth, preferring a shorter deal with a player option. Owner Glen Taylor wondered aloud if Love could be deemed a star given the Wolves’ lack of playoff appearances. (In recent weeks, Saunders advised Love to redirect his frustrations with the lack of team success inward. To call the organization’s relationship with their star dysfunctional would be understatement).
By the time the Wolves brought in a coach with pedigree in Rick Adelman, and decided not to retain Kahn, it was too late. Adelman’s best days as a coach were behind him, and he was distracted by familial concerns; Love and Rubio both missed significant time with injuries in 2012-2013, and the 2013-14 season took on a metaphorical weight the roster couldn’t carry. When the Wolves finished two games under .500 — and nine games out of the final playoff spot — it capped a disappointing season in which they underperformed their statistical expectation by eight wins, and lost 13 of 19 games they played that were determined by four points or less.
So, Kevin Love is clearly a victim of his organization’s dysfunctional culture, right?
Yes, but…
Sun., July 13: Tainted Love
Sunday is karaoke night at Market Bar-B-Que. A block before I got there, I passed a woman waiting for the bus in a motorized wheelchair, sporting a santa hat, with a cigarette dangling from the side of her lips. You wouldn’t happen to have a transfer?
There was a neon sign attached to the building, featuring a three-armed pig in a chef’s hat and apron, and it creaked and whined as if it was conveying the general desolation of the area: a stretch of blocks that looked like something left over from the set of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Inside, a young man with a replica of a patron bottle hanging from his necklace was performing a Drake song, and he was followed by an older man in sunglasses and fedora who announced he would be performing an original piece. The instrumental kicked and he began: “You saying chivalry is deaaaaad? I need some m——-f——-g heaaaaad.”
I sat near a group of people that assured me that Kris Humphries and Kim Kardashian celebrated at Market after their wedding. That isn’t the only bit of gossip passed along. A couple swore to me they knew precisely how Kevin Love broke his hand, and it wasn’t, as he claimed — when he informed the press two weeks after the fact — from doing knuckle pushups. The name of another establishment emerged, but was quickly contradicted. The year they mentioned was the wrong year for the injury. They pointed me to another woman. Ask her, her cousin’s father owns the place. But when I asked, the woman appeared as confused by the insinuation as I was excited to hear about it.
Whatever happened to Love’s hand, the situation was … unusual. In the wake of the injury, there were whispers among many in the organization about his lack of integrity and commitment, about his inability to lead by example and command the respect of a locker room. One of the lines of thought about Love is that he’s aloof, and his teammates reciprocate that cold indifference. They’ve long regarded him as more invested in plotting his next move than in his current situation.
J.J. Barea — who has an inflated sense of his own worth as a basketball player, but also has a championship pedigree — has gotten into three public spats with Love over the past two seasons. At season’s close, when Rubio was asked about Love’s potential departure for greener pastures, he gave a lukewarm endorsement of Love’s talent while questioning whether he was ever the right leader for the team. If Love’s teammates want to keep playing basketball with him, they sure have been impressively coy about it.
Then there’s this:
It’s a chart of the best players to miss the playoffs their first six seasons in a row. “Best” here is defined by most Win Shares accumulated over those six seasons. The top four names share some obvious commonalities: they played for organizations that were in total disarray during their time there; they were defensively limited power forwards who were asked to play out of position at times; they put up gaudy numbers, but would be tagged in fan parlance as prototypical “stat-padders.”
It’s not a list that inspires confidence in Kevin Love’s eliteness.
Then there’s Love’s defense. Opponents shot 57 percent on shots at the rim defended by Love, the league’s highest rate for a defender who defended at least six shots at the rim per game. Love is rotating to the basket on defense just fine; he’s simply not altering any shots once he’s there. That 57 percent conversion rate put him in the company of players like Jrue Holiday, Rodney Stuckey, and Jordan Crawford. Essentially, Love defended the paint like a wing. Opponents openly mocked him.
A friend of mine calls Love “a 43-minute star.” He’s in elite company for nearly the entire game, until the last five minutes, when he’s downright average. Love’s “close and late” numbers support the theory. His shooting percentages dip from everywhere on the floor, including the line. That certainly could explain the Timberwolves’ dreadful record in tight games this past season.
So Love’s teammates dislike him, his organization questions his integrity and commitment, he shoots worse with the game in the balance, and he defends the paint like a wing … sounds like someone you wouldn’t ever trade young, top draft picks away to get.
Yes, but…
Playing with better teammates will allow Love to split his movements on defense between contesting shots and rebounding instead of focusing strictly on the defensive glass. It will also allow Love to be more aggressive on defense, because if he is playing with, say, LeBron and Kyrie Irving, his team won’t collapse on the offensive end if he’s sitting on the bench with his fourth foul. Last year, Minnesota outscored opponents by 5.9 points per 100 possessions with Love on the floor; when he was off it, they had one of the worst point differentials in the league.
Love’s numbers should dip in the fourth quarter. He’s never played with an appropriately talented wing or a guard who can score (Kevin Martin being, by far, the best over the years), and has to force things against defenses that collapse on him because he’s often the only legitimate threat on the floor.
More encouraging news: the last four years Chris Bosh was on the Raptors, they had a defensive rating average of 109 — the same as Love’s last four years on the Timberwolves. Bosh suddenly jumped to a much-better-than-league-average defensive rating when he moved to Miami — in part because he could conserve energy on offense, and had more help with defensive rotations from competent teammates. The same can hold true for Love.
Monday, July 14: Love don’t live here anymore
“People think it’s so farfetched that I would stay in Minnesota. And I’m not shitting on the Lakers, but we have the better team, the better foundation. I’m having fun.”
I went back downtown to catch the MLB Future Legends game, but the day was so gorgeous, I skipped out early and wandered the downtown streets again. Even with the increased police presence, bizarre characters were camped out, and the intermingled scents of marijuana, despair, and restlessness hung about alleyways like an unholy territorial marker.
I hopped on the Light Rail to the Mall of America, an uber-ultra-mega-mall that used to be a baseball stadium, and can now house seven baseball stadiums. It’s home to a vast expanse of every imaginable clothing/shoe/junk store, with a children’s amusement park, two massive food courts, a mini-golf mountain, and a multi-screen theater, to boot. A dining experience can become a trip to a gift shop; kitsch meets fiction and suddenly Bubba Gump’s shrimpire crosses over from film to reality.
I last all of 10 minutes. On the way back to the Light Rail, I asked a ruddy-faced, spherically-shaped man on the platform which train of the two currently in the station was heading back downtown? He shrugs. “I don’t take the Light Rail, I live in Eagan. I’m just meeting a friend.” I ask him his opinion of Kevin Love and he says, simply and brusquely, “For Pete’s sake, I’m a hockey guy!”
Minneapolis isn’t a city that cares about Kevin Love, and despite his saccharine overtures — he purchased a full page ad in the Star Tribune to thank Timberwolves fans for helping elect him to the NBA All-Star this past season — it’s clear the feeling is mutual. In fact, Love and the Timberwolves aren’t even second banana in the general Twin Cities area, where the Gophers (and even high school hockey) are more likely to get people worked up than whatever’s happening at the Target Center.
The proof is in the pudding: the Wolves rank 27th out of 30 NBA teams in attendance. In comparison, the Minnesota Wild rank a much healthier 12th out of 30 NHL teams, and average more fans per game than the Wolves. The championship-caliber Minnesota Lynx have ranked second in WNBA attendance for the past two seasons, averaging 2,000 more fans per game than the league average over that period.
Even Minnesota State House of Representatives member Pat Garofalo took to twitter this year to declare:
Let’s be honest, 70% of teams in NBA could fold tomorrow + nobody would notice a difference w/ possible exception of increase in streetcrime
This just isn’t a (men’s) pro basketball city.
Tuesday, July 15: Love is Here And Now You’re Gone
(Yep you, Wiggins. Hopefully not you, future.)
By the time I get to South Minneapolis’ iconic Matt’s Bar early afternoon, I’ve talked myself into believing the Cavs absolutely should trade Andrew Wiggins, Anthony Bennett and a future pick for Love. A player of his many gifts shouldn’t be judged by his organization’s buffoonery.
Then again, his teammates’ rumored disdain and observable apathy for him is a bad indicator. I’m also pretty certain the best cure for his defensive limitations is a shotblocking behemoth flanking him inside the paint — not a 32-year-old, injury-addled Anderson Varejao.
Due to the influx of tourists for the All-Star game, as well as a recent visit to Matt’s by President Obama, I have plenty of time to sort out my thoughts — there’s over an hour wait just to be seated.
LeBron’s letter in Sports Illustrated preached patience and long-term vision, so why the overzealous pursuit of a quick fix? Irving’s contract extension kicks in after next season, and between him, LeBron, and Love, they’d have around 80 percent of Cleveland’s cap tied up. Didn’t the Mavs and Spurs bookend the Heat’s two titles by employing a mix of depth, shooting, youth, and savvy veterans rather than spreading their payroll thin?
Yes, but…
With Love being a near-complete offensive player — having worked counters into his post game over the last two seasons — there is every reason to believe Love can be a second option on a championship team. Love proved under Rambis and with the Olympic team that he doesn’t need the ball to be effective. Finally seated, I checked a link a friend texted me: Nate Silver has projected a 63-19 record for the Cavs if they add Love, with a 40 percent chance of winning a championship.
I got my Jucy Lucy, and took a bite of this wonderful Cadbury Egg of a cheeseburger, oozing goodness like a heavenly oil well. This was a burger-lover’s burger — down and dirty, right off a small square of a grill tucked in the corner of the bar, worked only by one man, always overloaded with tickets due to popular demand.
The guy next to me tore through his Lucy in four quick bites, perhaps famished after the long wait at the door. “Pretty damn good, huh?” I remarked. He gave a half-nod, raised his eyebrows, and turned his palms up as if he were supporting the weight of an epiphany.
“It’s pretty good,” he said, his voice trailing off for a second, “but … The Nook might have a case for the best Jucy Lucy in town.”
