Kevin Love: Too cold, too hot, or just right?

If there’s any one thing in basketball that is hardest for analysts and fans alike to do, it is figure out how much of a player’s performance depends upon their teammates. Or rather, the absolute, top stars in the league are clearly recognizable by the fact that their performance is not super relative. It’s not clear, for example, that there’s a team in the East LeBron could go to that wouldn’t make the NBA Finals.

This, however, only describes a very small number of the NBA’s stars. It is, right now, easy, for example, to think that Klay Thompson or Kyrie Irving would be stars no matter where they went and hard to believe that either Finals team would be as good if you subbed in, say, DeMar DeRozan instead.

As a Mavs fan, I’ve seen all sides of this. During their decade and a half run of success, player after player came to the Mavs and seemed to be “revealed” as the kind of contributor sportswriters appreciate. However most – for example – Monta Ellis, would, upon leaving the team, never have that kind of success again. In a handful of other cases, guys like Shawn Marion and Tyson Chandler really did seem to be done until they arrived on the Mavericks, where their extraordinary abilities were once again made visible.

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I don’t really like talking about Klay Thompson or Kyrie Irving in this context, because anyone who tells you they know what the deal is is lying. For Kyrie, it feels like a lot of people assume he’d be the same player without LeBron now, at the very beginning of his prime, as he was in the three years before LeBron got there. For Klay, his whole career has been this Warriors team. There’s no doubt that, with his ability to shoot and defend, he’d be a major cog for any team, and there’s no way to know how well he’d do on an otherwise bad team.

But then there’s Kevin Love, who has always been a perplexing player. At times in Minnesota, his counting stats painted the picture of someone who might have been the best power forward in the league, although advanced stats didn’t always support that conclusion. Certainly, he’s a guy who combined skills in a way you almost never see in the league — at 6-foot-10, he’s a deadly 3-point shooter and deadly on the glass. In Cleveland, he’s become particularly well known for his outlet passes, which show extraordinary touch.

In Minnesota, however, he never won, and while wining is a bit overrated as an analytical tool at a certain point it becomes hard to deny. No one ever confused Love (or pretty much anyone else in the league) with LeBron, but again, it probably doesn’t matter who’s on his team, they’re at least making the second round of the playoffs. All those years in Minny, Love never even made it.

Now, however, he’s in his third straight Finals, but is generally regarded as a less impressive player than he was in his Minnesota days, in contrast to somebody like Kevin Durant who switched to a loaded team without losing much. Now, part of that is perception, not reality:  this year’s 21.8 and 12.7 on .427/.373/.871 compares favorably to all but two of his Wolves years, his 24-12.3 year (.448/.372/.824) in 2011-2012 and his 25.9-12.4 (.457/.367/.804) in 2013-2014 and that is presumably because this year his usage (26.4) creeped the closest it has come to the bulk of his Wolves years (generally around 29).

Still, however, he rarely seems to take over games himself and it is not clear that he has personally benefitted significantly from playing with LeBron. That is, typically when you’re playing with better teammates, you get better shots when in fact Love’s field goal percentage in Cleveland has, every year, been lower than his career average to date. Meanwhile, he has been right at his career average from the arc for most of his Cleveland tenure. Generally it seems that Cleveland is very good when Love is playing well but doesn’t really need him all that much.

The Cavs swept the Pacers and the Raptors both this playoffs with Love contributing 15.5 and 12 points per game respectively. On the other hand, Love was terrific against the Celtics, maybe the only team that anyone thought could compete with the Cavs and it is likely due in part to his 22.6 and 12.4, not to mention 53.5 percent 3-point shooting that the Cs not only won just a single game but hardly seemed to threaten besides.

We know that Love can be a mainstay on a pretty good team, if not a playoff team in the ultracompetitive West. We know he can be a roleplayer on a great team whose good games can elevate the Cavs to a level almost nobody else can reach. And yet, it still feels like we don’t know Kevin Love. Is he as good as he was in Minny? As extraneous as he sometimes seems in Cleveland? How is it best to describe him, his strengths, and his flaws? Is his career as a Cav, as high-level as he still sometimes plays, overall disappointing, or is he instead to be applauded for putting the team’s needs first?

This may all seem like esoteric ramblings but if (when?) Cleveland loses this NBA Finals, trading Love may be their only viable option for significantly adapting the team.

What I would suggest is that the unusual array of talents that have made Love such a special player also tend to make him a difficult fit for any talented team. Love may be the best offensive rebounder in the league, for example, and once in Minnesota he averaged more than four a game for two seasons in a row. But, when you have other guys who operate out of the post, you’re better off putting Love behind the 3-point line, which is no doubt why he’s averaged a pedestrian 1.9, 1.9, and 2.5 with Cleveland.

He’s a tremendous three-point shooter for his size, but he’s not really an elite 3-point shooter by percentage: his 37.3 percent this year, nearly a point better than his career average, was good for 66th in the league in the regular season, just ahead of guys like Eric Gordon, Tyler Johnson, Jeremy Lin, and Austin Rivers. And, while he’s a great rebounder on both sides of the floor, he’s a poor defender, which affects where he can be put on the floor.

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All this is to say that to get the most out of Kevin Love, you probably do have to have a team where he can do more than he does in Cleveland. On the other hand, the Cavs ought to be mighty happy that they get as much as they do.