NBA Trade Rumors: 5 Teams That Should Trade For Kevin Love

If the Cleveland Cavaliers make Kevin Love available, here are five NBA teams that should make an offer.

Contrary to what NBA Twitter would lead you to believe over the last few days, the Cleveland Cavaliers are still an elite team.

Their 30-11 record gives them a 3.5-game lead for the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference, they have three superstar-caliber players, and they join the Golden State Warriors and San Antonio Spurs as the only three teams in the league to rank in the top five for both offensive and defensive rating.

At this point it’s hard to envision anyone in the East preventing the Cavs from breezing their way to the NBA Finals for the second season in a row. The only problem is when they get there, what’s likely to be waiting for them will be a heavily favored Western Conference juggernaut that Cleveland may not be prepared for as currently constructed.

You wouldn’t be blamed for wondering why the Cavs have been involved in so much trade speculation. They’re clearly an elite team and LeBron James has been enough to get whatever team he’s played on into the Finals for five straight years out East.

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But King James has only worn the NBA crown twice in his six Finals trips, and though many foolhardily claimed the Golden State Warriors were “lucky” Cleveland didn’t have Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love in last year’s championship series, the Dubs’ recent 34-point curb-stomping of the Cavs — in Quicken Loans Arena, no less — helped put that silly narrative to bed.

With a team centered around LeBron and two other stars, the Cavs easily have enough to make another Finals appearance here in 2015-16. But with Kyrie and Love being defensive sieves that a team like the Dubs can pick apart at will, Cleveland may want to think about tweaking the roster in order to make sure this team can actually defeat whatever monster emerges from the West. The most logical choice? Moving Kevin Love.

Kyrie has been injury-prone throughout his career, but he’s only 23 years old and has quickly become LeBron’s right hand man in Cleveland. Having a playmaker, scorer, ball handler and perimeter shooter of Irving’s caliber alongside James makes the Cavs deadly on offense, leaving Love as the odd man out whose value to Cleveland has rapidly declined since Kyrie’s return.

Since the Cavs got Irving back, Love’s numbers have dropped to 13.0 points and 11.9 rebounds per game on 37.8 percent shooting. Before the return of Cleveland’s star point guard, Love was posting 17.6 points and 10.8 rebounds per game on 43.4 percent shooting.

Love’s importance simply fades with Irving and LeBron sharing the floor, and even worse, he’s been borderline unplayable against the two teams Cleveland would be most likely to meet in the Finals: the Warriors and San Antonio Spurs.

In a Jan. 14 road contest against the Spurs, Gregg Popovich put Love through a myriad of pick-and-roll sets to capitalize on his defensive deficiencies, which helped San Antonio pull away late. In that Jan. 18 shellacking against the Dubs, Love was rendered useless by small-ball lineups that helped the Dubs blow the game open before halftime.

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In a seven-game series, the Dubs’ small-ball lineups and Pop’s schematic brilliance would force David Blatt to limit Love’s minutes, since he’s simply too much of a defensive liability who no longer brings enough offense to the table to counterbalance it. Having just signed a five-year, $110 million extension, the Cavs might toy with the idea of trading him for the kind of player (or players) who could actually help the Cavaliers finally bring home a title to “The Land.”

The Cavaliers don’t need Kevin Love to win the East, and he’d still be a desirable asset since it wasn’t long ago that he was putting up a massive 26-12-4 stat line in Minnesota. He’s a former star who just hasn’t fit well in Cleveland, and his rebounding, perimeter shooting and post game would be coveted by other teams, even with the way his stock has decreased over the last year.

Bearing all this in mind, here’s a look at five NBA teams that should consider trading for Kevin Love if the Cavs do decide to make a gutsy call and trade their most movable asset for pieces that would better prepare them for a seven-game series with the Warriors or Spurs.

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