20 NBA Hall-of-Fame careers that were cut short by injury

NBA Hall-of-Fame career cut short: Kevin Love

NBA history is chock full of a number of excellent third bananas. These are players who could have been the star of their own team, but instead, sacrifice touches and numbers to help a championship team win it all. Chris Bosh, James Worthy and Horace Grant come to mind, among others.

The key to those kinds of players making the Basketball Hall of Fame is also proving they are not simply empowered role players, but that they can truly star when on their own. Some players get to do that, but others do not and it makes their resumes more difficult to parse out.

That’s the case with Kevin Love, who spent a few years filling the box score on his own before joining the Cleveland Cavaliers and playing third banana to LeBron James and Kyrie Irving. The Cavaliers rode that formula to four consecutive NBA Finals and one title.

Then Irving and LeBron were gone, and it was Love’s team to lead. He signed a lucrative contract extension to stay in Cleveland, and then promptly got hurt. Again. And again. He played 22, 56 and 25 games over the next three seasons, was clearly limited when he did play, and has talked publicly about the emotional tailspin it all put him in.

Love is now playing on a really good team, if as a valued bench player, and his path to improving his resume now is to contribute to another NBA Finals team. He has a decent enough shot to make the Hall of Fame, but it’s far from a lock. If he had stayed reasonably healthy his career statistics would be markedly better, he would likely have notched a few more All-Star appearances, and his case would be rock solid. As such, it’s fairly cracked.