Cleveland Cavaliers almost didn’t trade for Kevin Love

The Cleveland Cavaliers reluctance to trade Andrew Wiggins for Kevin Love has been understandable — to a certain degree — but it seems they’ve come to their sense.

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The plan wasn’t always to trade Wiggins for Love though, in fact trading Love wasn’t always part of the plan at all.

According to Brian Windhorst and Marc Stein of ESPN, the original plan for the Cavaliers was to not make a trade for Love and instead try to just sign him next summer without having to give up Andrew Wiggins, but LeBron James was a deciding factor in getting the trade done now.

"The Cavs initially weren’t planning on offering Wiggins for Love and believed they could court Love as a free agent next summer once they freed up the cap space to execute such a deal. But within days of James officially signing his new Cleveland contract and having additional personal discussions with Love — which do not violate NBA anti-tampering rules because the league does not police player-to-player discussions — Cleveland had changed its stance and, according to sources, made Wiggins available to the Wolves."

The Cavaliers have the framework in place to acquire Love from the Timberwolves, but league rules are rather strict about trade talks taking place with players who can’t be traded — at least not yet.

Wiggins can’t been moved until the end of the month, which means that the big deal could end up getting vetoed by the league and set everything back to zero.

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