Pretty sweet dunk, right?
Let’s stop for a minute to remind ourselves that the Kevin Love-for-Andrew Wiggins and Anthony Bennett was a fantastic move for the Cleveland Cavaliers. Love may be struggling this season, relative to his previous All-Star play, but he tossed in as many points on Tuesday (20) as Wiggins and Bennett combine to average per game.
That dunk wasn’t technically on Love, I suppose, but that’s only because Kevin didn’t bother to jump up to defend the toss in against his former Minnesota Timberwolves team. A very Kevin Love-like move, and a very Cleveland Cavaliers-like move.
Anyone calling this move symbolic, though, is just trolling for hits.
Wiggins might be leading all rookies in scoring, but the youngster still has a single digit Player Efficiency Rating – around half of what Chicago rookie Nikola Mirotic is producing this year. Bennett has bounced back from the worst year of any top overall pick in modern NBA history, but that wasn’t hard to do. He’s rebounding well, he’s thankfully stopped shooting three-pointers, and he never turns the ball over, but he’s also a scoring forward that isn’t shooting nearly enough times to make his court appearances worth it.
Meanwhile Love, at his lowest ebb and on a team that still doesn’t know what to do with him, is still averaging 17 points, 10.5 rebounds and two and a half assists for the league’s fourth-best offense. And he has four more months to figure out just when and where to get his; something that should come in time, as we saw on Tuesday when the Cavs demolished the Minnesota Timberwolves by 21 points.
All of this might stick in the craw of Wolves el jefe Flip Saunders, who remarked on Monday that Love “turn(ed) on Minnesota” by forcing a trade away from the franchise that ruined his first six years in the NBA while effectively handing him a three-year contract as opposed to the five-year deal he deserved.
According the Flip, he ain’t allowed to talk about Love a no-mo:
That’s an odd one. I suppose the league can technically accuse Saunders of tampering – Love will be a free agent this summer when he opts out of his contract – but it was Flip that looked foolish in the wake of his comments.
At some point Saunders is going to have run out of things to talk about, I suppose. Like handing the Philadelphia 76ers what could be a completely unprotected 2017 first round draft pick for the services of the middling Thaddeus Young (averaging 14.5 points as Minny’s leading scorer this season, with just 4.5 rebounds a game, making just over half his free throws) just to round out a roster made up entirely of prospects.
Minnesota did well with the Love transaction. On paper, trading even a superstar like Love for the last two top overall picks in the NBA drafts (with their names redacted) is a killer deal. It’s just fine for this swap (with Thaddeus Young excluded) to be a win-win, even if Love isn’t dropping 26 a game anymore, and even if Wiggins and Bennett are dealing with the expected struggles of two players whose ages combine to top out at just a year over the age Kevin Garnett will turn this May. Minnesota may be currently awful and the Cavs might be underachieving, but both should be happy with their lot.
Let’s just stop pretending that this is some either/or situation worth making December statements about, and enjoy the dunks, aiight?
(Tweets via Pro Basketball Talk.)
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