NBA Finals Preview: Kevin Love could blow it or blow up
After missing the 2015 NBA Finals with a dislocated shoulder, Kevin Love will be understandably eager to make his mark in Cleveland’s rematch against Golden State. Unless Cavaliers head coach Tyronn Lue devises a defensive scheme that prevents Love from switching onto the Warriors’ guards, however, the UCLA product is likely to wind up as the scapegoat if Cleveland again falls short in the Finals.
There’s no sugarcoating it: Love was awful in Cleveland’s two regular-season matchups with Golden State. He shot 6-of-21 from the field over those two contests, averaging 6.5 points, 12.0 rebounds and 3.0 assists in just over 30 minutes per night. While his advanced defensive metrics in those games weren’t as horrendous as one might expect — Golden State only averaged 101.9 points per 100 possessions while he was on the floor, shooting just 42.7 percent from the field — the Warriors did outscore Cleveland by an average of 15.2 points per 100 possessions during his 61 minutes of action.
Worse yet, they repeatedly exploited his lackluster pick-and-roll defense, which figures to be a common refrain throughout the Finals.
During their Christmas Day contest, it took all of four minutes for Love to get switched onto against Curry on the perimeter, likely eliciting shrieks of horror from Cleveland fans in attendance. Their fear was well-founded, as the reigning MVP easily blew past Love and drove right to the basket. If not for Timofey Mozgov sliding over to contest Curry’s layup, Golden State would have gotten two easy points from Love’s miscue:
In the third quarter, it was Klay Thompson’s turn to take advantage of a Love switch. Draymond Green laid out J.R. Smith with a hard screen, leaving Love on an island against Thompson behind the three-point arc. Like his fellow Splash Brother did earlier in the game, Thompson attempted to get Love on his heels and fly to the basket for an easy deuce. Instead, Smith disengaged from Green just in time to impede Thompson’s path to the cup, which gave Love time to recover and contest the shot attempt:
Though the Warriors didn’t score on either of those possessions, they’d gladly take their chances with a one-on-one matchup between Love and one of their two All-Star guards. More often than not, it’ll end poorly for Cleveland, as was the case in the fourth quarter of that contest.
This time around, the Warriors ran a pick-and-roll with Shaun Livingston and James Michael McAdoo. As the latter set a screen on Iman Shumpert, Love retreated toward the paint, presumably willing to concede an 18-foot jumper from Livingston. Once Love saw that Livingston wasn’t going to stop-and-pop upon getting around McAdoo’s screen, he scrambled to recover, but it was too late. Livingston pulled up from the charity stripe and drained a jumper in Love’s face:
Offensively, Love wasn’t much better, finishing with just 10 points on 5-of-16 shooting and missed all five of his three-point attempts. He did pull down a game-high 18 rebounds and chip in four assists, but Golden State emerged with the 89-83 victory, continuing their unprecedentedly sizzling start to the season. Afterward, Love told reporters in reference to his cold shooting, “It’s one of those nights. I don’t know if you’ll ever see Kyrie and myself go 0-for-11 from three again.”
If keeping things close against Golden State at Oracle Arena on Christmas encouraged the Cavaliers, their matchup a few weeks later presumably deflated the air from that balloon. The Warriors romped to a 132-98 victory in Cleveland, a blowout that seemingly set the wheels in motion for head coach David Blatt’s dismissal. Love badly struggled on both ends of the court that night, finishing with just three points 1-of-5 shooting, six rebounds, two assists and a block in 21 minutes. On the one hand, he had the best plus-minus rating of any Cleveland starter; on the other, he was still a minus-18.
Much like in the Christmas Day game, Golden State routinely targeted Love in pick-and-rolls, attempting to get their guards switched onto him. Within the first minute, Green and Andrew Bogut ran a misdirection play, putting Mozgov in no-man’s land. Green flared out to set a screen on Kyrie Irving as Love had to fight through Bogut running right at him, which resulted in a wide-open 27-footer for Curry. Whereas Love’s late recovery wouldn’t be an issue against 99.9 percent of shooters — after all, who routinely pulls up from that deep? — the now-two-time MVP is the exception to that rule.
Right before halftime, the Warriors bunched Harrison Barnes, Ian Clark, and Andre Iguodala near the right side of the basket, giving Green and Thompson a full half of the court to exploit in a two-man game against Love and Shumpert. Thompson came running toward Green to receive a handoff while Green positioned himself to screen Shumpert, forcing Love into a mismatch. With a full head of steam, Thompson blew past Love and barreled toward the basket, drawing a foul on Love and barely missing an and-1 opportunity.
There’s no way to discuss Love’s defensive shortcomings against Golden State without bringing up the following lowlight, which SB Nation’s Mike Prada broke down in painstaking detail, calling it “one of the worst defensive sequences of the season.”
Love guessed completely incorrectly on the play, leaving him nowhere near the pick-and-roll he was supposed to defend with Green and Curry. As he rushed out to the perimeter to recover, Curry dished the ball to a hard-charging Green, who flipped it over Mozgov’s outstretched arms for an easy lob to Bogut. The look on the face of the Cleveland fan who the camera cut away to says it all.
According to ESPN.com’s Zach Lowe, Warriors officials privately lamented the absence of Love and Irving from much of last year’s Finals, as it forced the Cavaliers “to play superior defenders in their place.” Through Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals, Cleveland’s opponents had scored “1.09 points per chance when they involve those two as the primary pick-and-roll defenders in a play that leads directly to a shot attempt, drawn foul or turnover,” Lowe wrote, citing SportVU data. Foes were putting that duo into “twice as many pick-and-rolls each game as they averaged in the regular season,” per Lowe, “a massive jump out of proportion to the slight uptick in minutes the two are playing together.”
Based on how poorly Love fared guarding Curry, Thompson, and the other Warriors guards when he found himself switched onto them, head coach Steve Kerr would be insane not to emulate that strategy. The Splash Brothers tormented Oklahoma City Thunder center Steven Adams in the second half of Monday’s Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals, with Curry in particular relishing the opportunity to take one sidestep and repeatedly pull up for a nothing-but-net triple. If Adams struggled to defend those plays, just imagine how Love will fare.
Green will give Love fits on defense as well, especially if the Cavaliers ever double-team Curry or Thompson and leave him to be a 4-on-3 playmaker. Love lacks the lateral quickness and defensive awareness to prevent Green from generating easy offense for himself and his teammates in that scenario, which Golden State will assuredly attempt to exploit as well. If Cleveland sticks Love onto Bogut as his primary defensive matchup, that turns him into the Cavaliers’ last line of defense at the rim, which presents its own set of problems.
In Love’s defense, both regular-season matchups against Golden State came with Blatt at the helm, not Lue. The first-year head coach hasn’t shied away from tinkering with his frontcourt rotation throughout the playoffs, including trotting out Love at center at times. That look proved particularly troublesome offensively against the Detroit Pistons in the opening round of the playoffs, as head coach Stan Van Gundy told reporters following his team’s Game 1 loss.
“He spreads floor out and it makes it tough in pick-and-rolls for your 5s to get out there,” he said. “We didn’t cover [Love] well, even when we do cover, then we’ve got our center away from basket. We’ve got the best rebounder in the game and we’re playing him 25 feet [from the basket].”
While Detroit’s Andre Drummond isn’t well-suited to drift out to cover a stretch-5 on the perimeter, Golden State has no such problem. In fact, the so-called “Death Lineup” with Green at the 5 — which helped swing the tide of last year’s Finals matchup — is uniquely equipped to handle such a matchup. If the Cavaliers trot out a Love-Channing Frye frontcourt to go shot-for-shot with Golden State, the Warriors may light them up at a historic rate.
If Love isn’t knocking down shots — such as when he went a combined 5-of-23 against the Toronto Raptors in Games 3 and 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals — the negatives he brings on defense begin to far outweigh his offensive positives. Unless Lue concocts a strategy limiting Love’s exposure to Curry, Thompson and the other Warriors guards, he may wind up doing more harm than good in this series.
According to ESPN.com’s Dave McMenamin, a “source with knowledge of [Cleveland’s] thinking” said the Cavs hoped Golden State would topple the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference Finals because they “want to know” — in other words, they’re curious how they’ll fare this time around with a full-strength squad. If Love’s regular-season performance against the Warriors was any indication, however, they may soon regret that wish coming true.
All statistics via NBA.com or Basketball-Reference.com, unless otherwise noted.
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