NBA unlikely to block Kevin Love, Andrew Wiggins trade

Although the NBA is said to be watching the Kevin Love-Andrew Wiggins trade between the Minnesota Timberwolves and Cleveland Cavaliers with a close eye, that’s likely as far as they’re going to go.

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Potentially simply issuing nothing more than a threat when rumors broke suggesting the league could block the deal, Steve Kyler of Basketball Insiders says the likelihood of such is rather low.

Unhappy with news suggesting Kevin Love will opt-out of his contract with the Cavaliers at season end only to re-sign, it was reported that the NBA believed tampering could be going on. That would result in breaching the integrity of the league, something the NBA isn’t okay with.

Still, blocking the trade appears doubtful.

This isn’t the first case of contractual news being leaked while a player was still under contract with a different team, however, it may be the first case of a player with such a pedigree like Kevin Love. Add in Andrew Wiggins’ name and you have a blockbuster deal on your hands, so the NBA is understandably going to watch the proceedings with an eagle eye.

However, it’s very likely that the rumors of Kevin Love signing an extension with the Cavaliers is nothing more than a word-of-mouth scenario and there’s no legal trail that the NBA could use to prevent such a deal.

In the end it was probably nothing more than the league telling both franchises to keep quiet because they didn’t want to deal with any tampering situations.