Should Portland Trail Blazers make a move for Kevin Love?

With the Portland Trail Blazers’ season going down the drain, should they make a move to trade for Kevin Love?

With the season not going to plan for the Portland Trail Blazers, they need to make a move to try and get their season back on track. The Trail Blazers are 10th in the Western Conference, two games behind the eighth-place Memphis Grizzlies.

This has been as a result of a number of things including injuries to Jusuf Nurkic, Zach Collins and Rodney Hood. Nurkic has been out for the entire season after suffering a fracture in his leg prior to the playoffs last season.

More from Hoops Habit

• 7 Players the Miami Heat might replace Herro with by the trade deadline
• Meet Cooper Flagg: The best American prospect since LeBron James
• Are the Miami Heat laying the groundwork for their next super team?
• Sophomore Jump: 5 second-year NBA players bound to breakout
• NBA Trades: The Lakers bolster their frontcourt in this deal with the Pacers

Collins injured his shoulder in early November and Hood tore his Achilles in the middle of December. What this has done to last season’s Western Conference finalists is something that not many people saw coming.

They are no longer moving the ball anywhere near the way they used to. The Trail Blazers are last in the NBA in assists per game with 19.5. This is down from last season’s 23.0 per game, which was good enough for 25th in the league. They are playing too much iso-ball to be successful.

As a result their scoring average is down from 114.7 points per game  last season to 111.5 points per game this season. While this is only 3.2-point per game differential, the NBA is a game of inches.

When you add the defensive differential, this is huge. Last season the Trail Blazers allowed only 110.5 points per game. This season they are allowing 113.9 points per game, meaning they are allowing an extra 3.4 points per game. This is a net differential of 6.6 points per game.

This shows that the Trail Blazers are actually missing a piece on defense, not just offense. During the offseason, Al-Farouq Aminu signed with the Orlando Magic, leaving the Trail Blazers. He was a key defender for the Trail Blazers, having a career defensive rating of 106 points per 100 possessions with a high of 109.

I have brought this all up due to the fact that if the Trail Blazers do trade for Kevin Love, they will be getting a good offensive player; he can space the floor with his range. His defense is good, when other players are there to help him. His career defensive rating is 106 points per 100 possessions. However, his last two seasons those numbers have risen 114 and 112 respectively.

This is not to say that Love would not help this team. His 18.2 points and 11.2 rebounds per game over his career will help any team. However, there are always a couple of issues with teams trading for Love.

The first is that Love is in the first year of four-year, $120 million deal. While his numbers would appear to be worth the contract, he does have a checkered injury past. Love has never played all 82 games in a season. His best was 81 games in his rookie year.

Love has five of his 11 completed seasons where he has played 73 games or more. His other six season, Love has played 60 games or less. Two of these seasons Love managed 22 and 18 games. Going by the law of averages, a $30 million player would be available for only three quarters of a season in two out of four contracted years.

This is not good enough return on investment for the Portland Trail Blazers, particularly because in order to match salaries they will need to send Hassan Whiteside, CJ McCollum or Damian Lillard to the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Trading either star guard would certainly give the Trail Blazers more salary cap wiggle room down the line. It would be such a huge loss for the team, particularly for such an injury-prone player in Love. That’s not even getting into the Cavaliers plans to develop Collin Sexton and Darius Garland as their future backcourt.

If the Trail Blazers sent Whiteside, who is an expiring contract in return for Love, then the Trail Blazers would have three players on $30 million and more until the 2022-23 season. This includes the massive four-year, $196 million deal signed by Lillard, which won’t begin until the 2021-22 season.

The Trail Blazers have two big men coming back in Nurkic and Collins. They may play this season, but if they don’t that is OK. The Trail Blazers do not need to handicap themselves against the salary cap by signing Love. If they want to resurrect this season, the Portland Trail Blazers need to look elsewhere, not to Kevin Love.