There are a lot of reasons for trade rumors. If you’re a player, it may be a way of sending a passive-aggressive message that you kind of want out of where you are without flatly coming out and saying it.
If you’re a team, it’s a good way to test the waters without putting it out there that you want to get rid of a guy, just to see what you can possibly get for him and the reaction if you do so. Or it may be a way of saying, “get your arse in gear or ship out.”
Wherever the latest concoction of Kevin Love to wherever (in this place, Boston with a three-team deal involving moving the eternal basketball black hole, Carmelo Anthony), whoever is tossing the trade rumor out needs to squash it and Cleveland needs to try their hand at something radical … patience.
Patience is a weird thing that no one really likes anymore. It takes time, maybe some difficulty, in sports, some floggings, and some sleepless nights.
If Cleveland is really trying to float out Kevin Love, you may as well take a fire hose to the set of offices where the general management team signs the checks. Love was an on-again-off-again issue last season as to whether or not he fit with the team, yet they chose to sign him to a max deal when they could have just cut their losses.
To try and move him some six months later is asinine. You had a year to figure out if it would work long-term and had a chance to get out of it cleanly if it didn’t.
The same goes for Love. He knew the culture and chemistry of the team and organization when he made a few eyelash bats at other organizations in free agency before coming back to the Cavs. If there’s buyer’s remorse on either end, it’s misplaced, immature, and completely lacking patience.
Cleveland and Love are better off staying put because, with such a distance betwixt they and anyone in the East, you’re tinkering for the sake of trying to be better than two teams in the West, only one of whom you’d actually see on the way to winning a title. People forget, but Cleveland was competitive for the most part with Golden State in spite of not having Kyrie Irving and Love in last year’s Finals.
This year, they’re better, and isn’t the juice worth the squeeze to see how they match up in full? And if it’s San Antonio, they’ve actually defeated the Spurs recently, one of the Spurs only four losses. Whatever friction exists between Lebron James and Love needs to be settled over a beer, grown man style.
Sit at the corner and hash it out ’til closing time and get a cab ride home. The goal of winning a title is greater than the individual feelings being hurt. The window of winning is small, so be happy you actually have it propped open.
Again, Love had a chance to leave and Lebron, who spends enough time dispelling that he’s the actual general manager to the point where you have to think he is, had the chance to say he didn’t want him back.
This is classic “getting back with your ex when you could have dated someone else and then wanting to break up with her again six months later after you just bought a house together.”
Absent all of that, the real joke of all this is that Cleveland is doing damn well since Tyronn Lue took over the team from David Blatt as head coach. No one is catching the Cavs barring injury. Time to settle up like grown men and get it figured out.
Bar doesn’t close ’til three, usually. Band playing is decent tonight. Get a booth and an open tab and be ready to win when you stumble out together, Kevin Love and Cleveland.
