On paper, at least according to common wisdom, it'd be a win. But I think Love-as-anchor is fool's gold for any team that really, really wants to win a championship. He cares a little too much about what that paper says, too. And on other paper, at least according to some advanced stats, Crowder might now be just as valuable overall. Even if Love returned to a 2014 level of production, how much better than the mediocre 2014 Wolves would the Celtics then really be, without Crowder? And if the point is to pair Love with another superstar like Durant, well...how much better than LeBron of a pairing partner can you possibly get, not to mention Kyrie, so how can one expect a better outcome? I also don't think Crowder is quite done improving his game, there's still one more level up he can break through to, perhaps the outer margins of the Kawhi/Draymond zone. Hold on to Crowder, indefinitely, and hold on to the salary space and the picks that'd be required to add Love and hold out for the special opportunity to steal a legit two-way franchise-changing big man, be it Simmons or Cousins or who can really say.
I'm going to hit you with the entirely opposite side of this trade. Everyone assumes that Love is the inflated player in this deal as bad as sounds what if Crowder is?
We all love Crowder for his improved shooting, his defensive acumen, and in general his character(although IMO he's been barking at refs a lot lately)... Meanwhile Kevin Love has been almost universally reviled as a stat padding whiner who couldn't lead in Minny and can't fit in in Cleveland, but the the one thing we all can seem to agree on is his talent. On an admittedly bad team with limitless opportunity Love produced like a top 10-15 player.
The inverse of that is equally true: When Love is producing like a top 10-15 player, it takes limitless opportunity, and results in a meh team.
Have we really gone so far into this rebuild that we've forgotten the golden rule of trading out of mediocirty... Take the best player and run.
That's how we wound up with Bob McAdoo, once upon a time. (Yes, if fate then unfolded the same way, then we could convert Love the next year into what would eventually turn into the equivalent of Parish and McHale, but probably better to just skip straight to that part this time, lol.) Traded out of mediocrity,
into a flashier mediocrity, at the cost of higher upside opportunities. At least with KG, he had proven that he could lead a bad team deep into the playoffs by himself. No such evidence for Love. And the evidence we do have...
Many of us assume that Crowder is this diamond in the rough and we'd be nuts to trade him and he's improved every year and he's a leader and Danny found our starting SF for the future. Well what if Crowder is another case of Minnesotta Love?
What if Jae Crowder is over achieving in the perfect situation, filling in the cracks left by shoot first high attention grabbing guards and offense first, finesse big men? Personally I think many of us are in danger of overvaluing an asset.
You said it: Overachieving
in the cracks.
If anything, I think we're probably still undervaluing him.
If the hangup in a Kevin Love trade is Jae Crowder I'd do it without a second thought. Crowder is a rare blue chip piece to use a Bill Simmons term. The type of asset you don't reach contention by holding onto, but by cashing in when the right opportunity presents itself.
Okay, so we cash Crowder in for Love. What would the best possible next step be? We could not possibly hope for any acquisition as good as, say, LeBron, right? And if Ainge could somehow pry away LeBron from Cleveland, too...well, shucks, can you imagine how excited we would be if Ainge could
then also acquire a third piece as improbably elite as, oh, say, Kyrie Irving? Wow! What a moist, homerific dream! How blessed we'd be! The sky would be the limit! Right? Well, no. Third best team in the league and a nearly assured Finals loss is the limit, as we can plainly see. How would an almost-as-unlikely rich man's backup plan of pairing Love with either, say, Simmons or Durant possibly work better?
I mean, it's possible that if Love had stayed in Minny he could've wound up leading a barely-improved Wolves into the playoffs last year or this. But he's never going to dramatically improve his defense. He'd be able to provide the offensive impact of prime Garnett, but never even remotely the defensive impact, besides defensive rebounding stats inflated by a stat-seeking mentality. If he hadn't gone to Cleveland and been exposed as inessential, it wouldn't have been believable to suggest such a possibility. But he did, the results are in, and the results are underwhelming, and the evidence strongly suggests the need to reevaluate Love's value both now, before, and going forward.
Topic: Recent Zach Lowe trade proposal (Read 7684 times)