Last year wasn't the easiest for Kevin Love. He wasn't in great shape, never vibed with LeBron James and saw the considerable talents that lifted him to three All-Star appearances in the loaded West go to waste in the Cavaliers' vanilla offense.
The Cavaliers are finally using Kevin Love properly, so far
The Cavaliers never figured out how to use Kevin Love’s strengths last year. This year, they seem to be making the right adjustments. Will that hold up?
Ken Blaze-USA TODAY Sports
A top priority for the Cavaliers is ensuring that Love fits in instead of fitting out this time around. They re-signed him to a five-year maximum contract, but not before James traveled to Los Angeles for a poolside heart-to-heart. The team has talked up his talents since, with James going so far to say that Love is the “focal point” of the offense.
The task of rebuilding Kevin Love is as much psychological as tactical. Still, there have been some promising tactical developments in the early part of the season.
More shots
On a very basic level, Love is gobbling up a larger share of the Cavaliers’ offense. His shot attempts per 36 minutes are up from 13.5 to 16.6. His usage rate, which measures the percentage of possessions he finishes with a shot attempt, drawn foul or turnover, is up to 24.6 percent, three points higher than last year’s mark. Neither of those numbers approach his best in Minnesota, but that’s to be expected when LeBron is still on the team.
But it’s also significant where Love is getting his offense. Nobody in their right mind would want Love to forget about his sweet jumper, but that too often was Love’s only activated skill last season. This year, he’s spending much more time where his career began: on the block.
Love is averaging 4.6 touches in the paint per game, which is two more than he averaged in that area last year while playing more minutes. The Cavaliers are going to him inside and he's delivering. Only two players (Paul Millsap and Rudy Gay) have scored more points per possession on their post touches this season, per NBA.com's Synergy Sports data.
Love doesn’t appear to be significantly more explosive than last year, but he’s being put in positions where he can dominate his matchup. The Cavaliers have been smart about throwing quick entry passes after side-to-side ball movement.
Love has also been particularly effective taking smaller players into the post this season. Teams often switched when he was involved in pick-and-rolls last year because he was only a threat from the perimeter. They also didn’t worry about a wing getting caught on Love in a transition cross-match because he wasn’t going to punish them anyway.
This season, he’s taken those players inside and scored on them.
The additional paint touches have another effect: they put him closer to the basket for offensive rebounds. Once upon a time, Love was one of the league's elite glass cleaners, combining an innate feel for caroms off the rim with textbook positioning. That area of his game declined as his offense moved outside and transition defense got picked apart, but it sunk to new depths in Cleveland. Five years ago, Love was third in the league in offensive rebound rate. Last year, he finished behind wings T.J. Warren, Tony Allen, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and Shabazz Muhammad.
Yet Love has seen his offensive rebound rate jump up four percentage points early this season. While Love is certainly making more of an effort, it’s easier for him to do so because he’s already there. You can’t grab offensive rebounds from the three-point line.
Love doesn’t seem to have the lift he did on his best days, but he’s at least being put in better positions to succeed.
More movement
It was never just the post touches and offensive rebounding that made Love such a force in Minnesota. It was also the way the Timberwolves moved him all over the court within the flow of their offense. Not only did this get Love more easy baskets, but it also leveraged his on-court intelligence and the threat of his shooting to help others.
This was surprisingly absent in Love's first year in Cleveland. It was as if they only noticed Love's perimeter shooting and decided he'd be enough of a threat standing in a corner doing nothing. Those that harped on Love's lack of involvement weren't talking about the limited shot attempts or plays run for him. They were talking about how he may as well have been Steve Novak on too many possessions.
There’s been some solid progress on this front early this season. To start, the Cavaliers are involving Love in ball screens more often and earlier in possessions. Love’s always had a great sense of when and how to slip these screens to get open, but the Cavaliers have finally provided an open floor for him to make strong decisions when he does.
This play ended with Timofey Mozgov getting swatted by Pau Gasol, but the process was sound. Cleveland quickly used Love to screen for Mo Williams, then opened the left side of the floor so Love had plenty of space to pop open. Once he did, he could shoot, quickly find his big man on a post duck-in or keep the offense moving with a pass or dribble handoff to Richard Jefferson in the corner.
There are plenty of other examples of this very sequence working to perfection.
The Cavaliers are also using Love as an offensive hub in the high post much like the Timberwolves once did. They can generate open shots for him this way.
Or, they can use him to get teammates open.
Cleveland’s even running a set that provides Love with two screens, giving him the option to shuffle into the low post or sneak open for a three at the top of the key.
These aren’t as intricate or frequent as the Timberwolves’ old sets for Love, but they are a good start. Even if Love himself isn’t scoring, his movement is creating good shots for teammates. The Cavaliers are finally realizing that Love is more of a threat to defenses when he’s actually doing something.
But is it enough yet?
The early-season trend is positive, but it's still very early. Love can still disappear for too long, as he did Wednesday against the Knicks. He's also not exactly converting on his better looks at a higher clip, shooting just 41 percent from the field and 32 percent from three-point range. Those percentages should rise given the open shots he's getting, but he simply may not be as good a shooter as was before shoulder surgery.
He's also doing this while Kyrie Irving is sidelined due to injury. It's much easier for Love to be the focal point when he only has to share an offense with James. What happens when Irving returns and starts doing his thing? Irving certainly deserves to have the ball in his hands, but at times, he can be a solo act, albeit a breathtaking one. How does David Blatt maintain Love's larger role while letting Kyrie be Kyrie?
There’s also the matter of LeBron. They are on good terms now, but Love and LeBron are very different people trying to maintain a healthy working relationship. Adversity could pull them closer together, or it can create fissures in a shaky foundation. Should that happen, we’ll see some on-court ripple effects, especially if LeBron continues to gravitate towards Irving.
All this is to say that Blatt still has his work cut out for him. For now, though, we’re at least seeing signs that the Cavaliers finally understand what actually makes Love such a deadly offensive weapon.
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